The Chinese

NESE

j • s • r: IC.Y sc:\

THE CHINESE

r"

A gem of Chinese architecture : Loong \Yah temple. Tang Period,

700 A.D.

THE CHINESE

By
JOHN STUART THOMSON

ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

"One seeing, however, is better than
a thousand people telling you of it*

— Ckituse Proverb,

INDIANAPOLIS

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT 1909
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

OCTOBER

PRESS OF

BRAUNWORTH & CO.

BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS

BROOKLYN, N. Y.

TO

L. M. S.

2216526

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I DAILY LIFE OF FOREIGNERS IN CHINA i

II THE PORTUGUESE AND CAMOENS IN CHINA ... 75

III INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE AMONG THE CHINESE . . 97

IV CHINESE HUMOR 173

V CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE .... 186

VI CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 248

VII MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS IN CHINA . . 290

VIII CLIMATE AND DISEASES OF SOUTH CHINA . . . 326

IX CHINESE RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION . . .363

X JAPAN'S COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE TO CHINA . . . 387

XI THE MIRROR OF THE PAST 417

THE CHINESE

THE CHINESE

DAILY LIFE OF FOREIGNERS IN CHINA

The feeling of exile, ever too melancholy in the heart
of the white stranger whose lot is cast in this southern
land of ten thousand granite peaks which extend along
the coast for two days of the sea journey from Shanghai,
is nowhere more happily dispelled for a season than at
Hong-Kong Island during the " race week " in Feb-
ruary. The indispensable Celestial, Ah Chow, arrives
from the breeding camps in Mongolia with a motley-
colored string of shaggy, hardy Chinese ponies, thirteen
hands high, for which he paid at the breeding steppes
only ten dollars each, but which he will sell at ten times
that price. They are all of such uncertain temper that
bets are laid as to whether they will be left at the post or
run away before the starter has shouted, " Go." Fat-
bellied as they are, some do the mile in two minutes ten
seconds. There was a day in China in the reign of
Hiao, when the Superintendent of the Stud ranked next
in importance to the Throne itself. Then horses were
large enough to bear armored men to battle. The his-
tory of stock in Japan, as well, since that time has been
one of decadence. These ponies are drawn by lot by
the staffs of the Scotch firms, English officers and gentle-
men, and the Parsee bankers who deal in opium and land.

i

2 THE CHINESE

Native mafoos (the same word you meet in Korea as
mapus}, or jockeys, are hired, and you will notice that
they mount from the right side. Betting booths for the
slow-going paris-mutuels, where the book-makers have no
chance to manipulate odds, are erected. In this French
form of betting each investor puts an equal amount into
the pool and those who have named the winning horse
share the pool money, less eight per cent, for expenses.
The anaemic European ladies do what the Chinese women
do, and paint their weather-melted faces. But they do
what the Chinese do not, that is, don chiffon and lace,
which all too soon is sorry and soggy in a dripping, moldy
climate. But what better portrays the spirit of Empire
than this very indomitableness of these English women —
this determination to have an Ascot of fashion at least
once a year even under humid tropic suns, or drizzly gray
skies and mist-wrapped peaks, on this one level spot of the
island, a filled-in swamp called Wong Nei Chong at the
foot of the exiles' blue- walled " Happy Valley " cemetery ?
Not only are China ponies run on three days of the meet,
but enough Walers of thirteen and one-half hands, Arabs,
India " country breds," and stray Americans, are gath-
ered together for a fourth day's racing. Frequent
gymkhanas are held, even through the hottest spell, when
the Polo Club members ride in tent-pegging, hurdle,
obstacle and nomination races, and such other horsey
excitement as shall keep ladies from ennui and young
gentlemen in debt to their shroffs, in a climate which does
not foster the memory. The most unique of all, cer-
tainly to the Chinese onlooker who is making notes for a
book, are the 'rickisha races, where the Ku-niangs
(ladies) wave their motley-colored Parisian parasols — it
would be impossible to hold at arm's length a Chinese

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 3

bamboo parasol — to urge their human steeds (not native
coolies this time, but English gentlemen) to win. The
English gentlemen jockies go to the post in the hard sun,
with wet bamboo or plantain leaves packed under their
helmets, but they are game enough (as the world may
always expect of our European Ulysses) to throw these
away as the race reaches the keen stretch. As the
Jockey Club of Bombay permits the women from Grant
Road to attend unescorted, so the Hong-Kong Jockey
Clubs permits the denizens of Lyndhurst Terrace to
watch the scene from a remote corner of the stands. It
would not be that " East of Suez " if exclusiveness had
not its startling inconsistencies. At Peking, the foreign-
ers do not adjourn to the famous old course outside the
northwest gate, beneath the Taoist and Buddhist temples,
until May.

They tell tales that at Mirs Bay and other practice
waters, the mess of the war-ship lands, sets cups into the
Chinese hills and tees off the first horseshoe gravestone
for an impromptu game of golf. I know the courses
which are laid among the native gcaves outside the Porta
Cerco of Portuguese Macao, in the Heungshan district of
China, and at Ichang are not much improved on this.
Hong-Kong boasts of two courses. That at Wong Nei
Chong is level, over a race-track twice, one swamp, and
made bunkers. Pulling the stroke is costly, because
most of the greens lie parallel with the track and ditch,
which penalize the player if driven into. The other
course at Deep Bay on the south side of the island is
reached by climbing over four miles of hills, or by a
launch sail of nine miles. The wooded hills are lofty, and
the joy of contemplating that you are playing in view of
the combing surf of the limitless Pacific is sublime. You

4 THE CHINESE

land from your launch by native sampans and play around
the edge of a narrow valley. The fifth tee is in the neck
of a gorge and the chaparral to each side, and the rocky
stream at your feet, are not St. Andrew's classic com-
forts. Put away your brassey and even your driver, for
that's no brawling burn before you. It is iron work; be
steady, satisfied with the tight, short gains of infantry
in face of fire. One foot off the course is to be enfiladed,
and put hors de combat. The nerve that is needed; the
thrill when it is all over! Again, there was that tree
which you learned to loft rather than play past it with
a cleek. On these two sides men who for many a year
in battle's din and travel's mire, have ever been as David
and Jonathan, shall be arrayed in unsettled argument
for ever, in a Service Club on Pall Mall or in a library
at Annapolis.

Here, too, is classic English law punishing by the
astonishing method in these days, of sentence to the
stocks. There must be the trappings of awe accompanying
the means of punishment where only two thousand Eng-
lishmen rule three hundred thousand Chinese, all crowded
on the north sloping beach of the island, or on the ten
thousand sampans in the harbor. There has not been a
riot among the natives since the memorable one of Oc-
tober 3rd, 1884. Beside Victoria the Good's statue, a
red-turbanned Sikh policeman stands over Kong Sing,
who sits on the powdered disintegrated granite road, with
his feet imprisoned in boards, all because of a vaga-
bondish habit of greasing his queue and looking covet-
ously at foreign gentlemen's watch chains. No fewer
than seventeen hundred undesirables were banished by
the Hong-Kong courts last year. Sometimes Chinese
mandarins come to the Colony and their victims follow

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 5

them to lodge complaint in a British court. Juries con-
sist of seven men, because of the scarcity of Europeans
serviceable. In Singapore, natives are mixed with the
Europeans to bring the jury up to twelve. A nefarious
but amusing trick of the light-fingered natives who oper-
ate on the crowded steamer wharves, is to expectorate
on their victim's left shoulder and then call his attention
to it. While he excitedly removes the heathen affront,
the rascal, whose ways are saffron, quickly goes through
the victim's right pocket. Natives imprisoned on grave
charges have to submit to their queues being cut, as for-
merly many excited prisoners hung themselves thereby
in their cells.

Hong-Kong's bustling port is peculiar in that there
are no wharves. Moreover, the anchorage, instead of
being well spread out from Causeway Bay to Kennedy-
town, is all crowded before the center of Victoriatown.
Every piece of freight is lightered, and every passenger
is ferried. British Hong-Kong is really Chinese Can-
ton's seaport. Two million passengers pass between the
two ports annually.

The picture of her tonnage can perhaps best be quickly
drawn by comparative figures; London thirteen million
tons ; Hong-Kong twelve million ; New York eleven mil-
lion tons annually. Hong-Kong's growth to be the sec-
ond port in the world is in some quarters credited to the
fact that she imposes only one charge on shipping, viz. :
the insignificant Lighthouse tax of one cent Mexican sil-
ver a ton; but Manila, which imposes no tonnage taxes,
remains stagnant at a small tonnage. Shanghai, which
imposes the highest tax in the Orient of twenty-nine cents
a ton, continues to enjoy a large share of shipping.
Yokohama imposes seven and one-half cents a ton.

6 THE CHINESE

Hong-Kong rejoiced at the close of 1906 to find herself
drawn twenty days nearer Europe by the new service, un-
der one management, of thirty days from Hong-Kong to
Liverpool via Vancouver and Quebec, and the Colony
expects to throw off her alienation in the host of travelers
who will visit the port and enter China through the
southern gateway, to which she is the key. The rateable
values of the city of Victoria have reached six millions,
nearly half of which is invested in the precipitous
" Peak " district above the clouds. On the mainland
at Kowloon, where the railway to Canton is rapidly
raising values and where the future of the Colony will
lie, rateables have reached two millions. Great as is
Hong- Kong's position in shipping and which is assailable
by China at Whompoa, her leadership will remain in
banking, headed by the noted Hong-Kong and Shanghai
Banking Corporation, which is now financing nearly all
China's great developments in railways, mines and in-
dustrials. If England, through this bank, would only
give one-fortieth of the attention to China that she has
given in the past to Japan, the harvest would be the more
potential, even as the high millet of the former's fields
overtops the rice fields of the latter. Hong-Kong and
Shanghai bank-notes are the only paper issues accepted
in the country back of the treaty ports. The name most
prominent with the Chinese in the history of the bank is
that of Sir Thomas Jackson, a tall Irishman, whose motto,
writ large, was : " Never break your word with a
Chinese, for he'll never break his with you."

It is believed that the Hong-Kong government and this
bank participated in the loans for the Chinese Trunk Rail-
way line, on the stipulation that China would assist in
connecting Hong-Kong and Canton by rail, and thus side-

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 7

track Whompoa for the present. This railway of
eighty miles, trestled across swampy country, will end at
Kowloon, the British settlement on the mainland, from
which Hong-Kong Island lies one mile distant. With
railways coming through from Calcutta, Mandalay, Bang-
kok and Hanoi, centering at Yunnan, and thence turning
to Canton, and with rails from Han-kau and Amoy,
Hong-Kong is dreaming of the time when she may be
the largest trans-shipping port in the world. Land is at
steeple prices, and living more costly than in New York
City. Tenure is based on crown rentals, the same as the
Chinese system.

This wonderful island, which is distant seven thousand
miles from San Francisco, supplies the Pacific coast of
America with half of its refined sugar. The raw mate-
rial comes principally from Java, but also from the Phil-
ippines and Chinese Swatow. The largest cane refinery
in the world is the noted Taikoo at Quarry Bay,
owned by Butterfield and Swire. There is also the
China Sugar Refinery at Wong Nei Chong, owned by the
historic house of Jardine, Matheson and Company.
Chinese labor refines two hundred thousand tons a year
at three and one-half cents a pound. The coal is brought
from Moji, Japan. It will before long come over the
Han-kau-Canton Railway from Fa- Yuen and elsewhere
in the heart of plethoric China. Up to the present these
two refineries have supplied China and Japan. Japan has
now put up a tariff wall of six-tenths cent a pound, and
is manufacturing her own sugar. She subsidizes steam-
ers to bring the raw product, and threatens to subsidize
ships to carry the manufactured article to China. Hong-
Kong, with cheap labor and a nearer location to the raw
product, is holding the fort so far against subsidy, and

8 THE CHINESE

is supplying China. For po-po or sweetmeat-making,
however, the Chinese prefer their own hand-refined
Swatow sugar, which goes half as far again as the
cheaper imported brands.

The Taikoo refinery is a marvelous study in Scotch
sociology. There is a Company reservoir and hospital in
the hills; a cable to carry the European overseers five
hundred feet over the gullies to the fever-free Company
bungalows on the cliffs ; Company model tenements at in-
expensive rents; a Company loan fund for overseers to
bring out Scotch wives; running track; athletic associ-
ations, medals and baths; launches for picnics, and a
seven-hundred-foot graving-dock and repair yard for
Company ships. Employees are encouraged to join
yacht, golf, water polo, gunning, cricket and riding clubs,
so as to be athletically happy even in enervating South
China. You will notice that nothing indoors, such as
billiards, has been provided. One looks in vain for the
great American firms of forty years ago. Russell and
Company, of clipper-ship fame, as well as the Heard,
Oliphant, Bull and Archer hongs, have ceased to exist,
and the historic hong of Dent and Company, at Macao,
has shrunk to an unpretentious and seldom-visited build-
ing, hid behind an ancient wall. Kee Chung, the old
princely house with its tropical garden, where Russell and
Company once entertained Secretary W. H. Seward, is
one of the show places of Wanchai, an eastern part of
Hong-Kong, now overrun with Chinese coal-carriers.

The disintegrating granite peaks of Hong-Kong may
some day furnish ping tu or porcelain powder as good
as that of the Kiang-si Hills. Cement works have al-
ready raised their chimneys over the famous land-locked
Kowloon Bay, where Admiral Keppel won Hong-Kong.

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 9

An Englishman (few as there are in the East as com-
pared with the Scotch), brings all his sporting and club
impedimenta to the Orient. In a little vale at Hong-
Kong, between Mts. Kellett and Gough, sixteen hundred
feet above the water, they have placed a bungalow club,
which has a marvelous view of peaks, seas and land-
locked bays. There is nothing like this view at those
other famous oriental mountain retreats from the heat,
such as Simla, Darjeeling and Namhan. The luxurious
and hospitable Hong-Kong Club, where I had the
pleasure of staying for a year and a half, would be hard
to surpass on Fifth Avenue or Pall Mall for accommoda-
tions and appearance. It is situated on the Praya Grande
Central, in the heart of Victoria City and at the bay's
edge. The Emperor of China could not be made a mem-
ber on account of his color, but I have heard of one
Parsee getting in through the eye of a needle, and it
was said the needle was threaded by the English king.
There will, however, never be another such contretemps.
The question of eligibility for this club is about the hot-
test question in Hong-Kong. Imperial politics and
nearer wonders are taken as a matter of course in
comparison, by these widely traveled Hong-Kongites.
To be sent into Coventry by the membership com-
mittee is a quietus on the most persistent aspirations,
in a colony where life is in the balance between
great social happiness and keen social misery, made
the more poignant by the feeling that you are so
remote from home that you could not go farther
on this globe without getting nearer. Porcelain baths;
electric fans; Amoy oysters in season; mango ice-
cream; curries made opiate with powdered poppy seeds,
and the noblest wines of Europe, minus export reduc-

io THE CHINESE

tions, but plus a little salicylic acid, are certainly luxu-
ries, to which a bouquet is added because it is all enjoyed
in the alien and uncomfortable tropics, where miseries
and privations are supposed to reign. The Japanese add
their most famous brand of beer, which they humorously
call Peace, and which name was suggested by their
richest magnate, Baron Mitsui. Perhaps the cuisine has
its wearinesses in the endless repetition of stewed cucum-
bers, sickly petsai, and tough fried brinjals, but never a
mortal tasted a richer dish than vegetable marrow when
served hot. Add some golden Dutch butter, which by
the way is unsalted, to the golden meat, and you despise
the namby-pamby " stay-at-home." Then the Australian
steamer arrives once a week with Queensland mutton and
beef, to take the place of the Chinese water-buffalo and
humped cattle from the West River hills. The Chinese
also offer you a turkey, which if lacking in gameness and
color, supplies a soft delicacy of flesh which is a wel-
come substitute for our bird. The furniture, paneling
and flooring of this club, like in the other fine buildings
of luxuriant Hong-Kong, is all of Siamese or Javanese
teak, which is the most durable, hardest to carve and
costliest of woods. It has a close grain and is polished
in its natural color, which is red. This is the wood which
is brought at great cost to America, to undersheathe the
armor of battleships. The fine carving is done by Can-
tonese in those wonderful shops of scented chips along the
narrow Sun Tau Lan, Yuck Tsze, Tai Sun, and Old
Factory Streets. The beautiful new Hotel Mansions, at
the water's edge ; the King Edward ; the famous old brick
Inn, the Hong-Kong, with its roster of ten thousand
world's notables ; and the unique Peak Hotel, nursed near
the summit above the clouds in Victoria Gap, are all

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA n

hostelries excellent enough to grace the Strand or Fifth
Avenue. The Peak Hotel is the center of the garrison
social life, and every dinner is a glitter of regalia, braid,
buttons, forgivable swagger and affected intonation.
You will notice the menus have numbers opposite each
item; brinjals may be number fourteen; marmalade, six-
teen; vegetable marrow, eight, and likewise with the
wine list; the boy would -not know what you meant by
Sparkling Moselle, but tell him number six, and you
will have your wine. The little cube of ice is re-
moved from your cocktail after it has chilled it, and is
used to perform the same service in your neighbor's glass.
iTorrid as is the climate, fleeting as is the life of the cube,
its service is a remarkably long one, for at the bars of
these treaty ports of the Orient the line of customers is
well filled, and be it said that American drinks reign.
When you permanently locate at a hotel or club you are
expected to bring in your own house boy to wait upon
you, the hotel only providing waiters for transients.
How one gets to hate the hot red heathen hills where
never for a moment in the long exile once lies the famil-
iar snow lines of home, and the first sight of snow on
Alt. ./Etna fills the returning wanderer with a thrill which
can only be understood by experiencing it. You believe
then that snow is the sign of the Saxon character.

As the expatriated Chinese sighs for his eel, mullet
and native quail, to be brought alive to him across the
wide Pacific, a thirty-days voyage, so the white man in
China longs most of all for frozen American oysters. It
is the mess of pottage for which he endures exile, and
with a tin and a cronie, he is able to knock through an-
other twenty days until the next steamer, with a cold stor-
age plant, arrives, when he forthwith hails a sampan, and

12 THE CHINESE

with a Lucullian smile, sails to make a studied flank at-
tack on the steward.

Nowhere in the world perhaps are lantern illumina-
tions more indulged in, and certainly nowhere so effect-
ively. The terraced homes all have the mountain peak
as background, and whether one looks from the bottom
of the cup up the illuminated hills, or down upon the mil-
lion lights which no factory smoke clouds, to the water,
and the fish lantern procession passing through the lower
streets and prayas, the view is glittering and multi-
colored. The natives are especially lavish of lanterns in
the time of the sixth moon, when every shop is radiant
with a lighted crab, fish, fowl, or dragon, the ingenuity
in design surpassing the more classic Japanese fashion in
lanterns.

No other race has looked upon the waters, and find-
ing them more level than the land, with quick wit and
sense, said that there by hundreds of thousands they
would anchor their tax-free homes. Hong-Kong and
Canton best present this unique spectacle, and the most
moving sight, emotionally and literally, in the world, is
when this immense populace is stirred by news of an ap-
proaching typhoon. Sails are hoisted, sculls and oars
put to work, and a dozen times a year a vast armada
sweeps like the scuds of clouds along the harbor, to an-
other place of safety beneath a great mountain peak.
How, on their return to the accustomed anchorage, they
settle their position by number and lane, no one of us
Wai I (outer barbarians) has ever yet been able to
determine, but sampan and junk certainly drop into posi-
tion as quickly as if drilled by a fleet-captain. Which-
ever foreigner can discover the key, will have given proof
of his genius to camp an army better than a Cyrus, or

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 13

shall we say as well as the local Yuan Shi Kai, on whose
kind the hopes of militant China rest.

The exile's solemnity is coaxed with the superb music
on the Parade Ground three times a week of the several
military bands, and indeed one hotel makes a feature of
employing the Baluchi's Indian band and pipers during
dinner. If nearly everybody else loafs on foreign duty,
the band is never idle. Too often it is Saul's march and
extra slow step, along the Wong Nei Chong Road past
the monument, to the hill side cemetery, for too many
a comrade who has died of drink, melancholy, or ma-
laria. The firing party loses no time in signaling among
the peaks that another of the king's soldiers has been
laid to his everlasting rest in the compulsory land of his
exile, only twelve hours after his death. Then it is a pip-
ing march back to the barracks at quick step, for the of-
ficers greatly fear the effect upon unaroused men. A
battle is less depressing to them, with its hastily gathered
dead on the field, than the draped gun-carriage and fu-
nereal pomp at the door of the barracks hospital. There
is, besides, playing in the barracks garden, for officers'
guest night, and music for the theater, all crowded into a
week, together with countless marches to be played from
the landing wharf to Government House steps for many
a braided Siamite, Nipponite and other Jebusite, who, by
adopting the comity of nations, has perforce bowed to
the yoke of our unpicturesque tailors. The German flag-
ship Hertha drops into port, and in an evening or
two afterward the German Club, established in a beauti-
ful Renaissance building on Kennedy Road, announces
that the warship's splendid string band will give a
musicale, which --is more clannishly attended than the
artistic treat warrants.

i4 THE CHINESE

And whenever Neptune and Mars meet and kowtow,
as they are always doing here, the gunners may be asleep
and the muzzles may be capped, but the Tommies who
" blow their lives out in China " in more ways than this
particular one, must ever be on hand with cornet and
trombone to make admiral and general extra-congratu-
latory. -• The philosophizing Chinese tax-payer, who
comes down from Canton on these occasions, again
shakes hands with himself, and explains that he insti-
tuted the custom of skimping on public works and being
lavish in imposing taxes for ceremonies' sake. None
of the treaty ports equals Hong-Kong in musical lux-
uries. Manila has one famous Filipino band and Sir
Robert Bredon at Peking has a Chinese band, both trained
by occidental masters.

It is an English colony, this island which dropped
as a first fruit from the folds of the flag of the Opium
War, but Englishmen rule by suggestion more than
compulsion. They endow, of course, but they have
elasticity of judgment enough to adopt, and this is why
they are successful colonial rulers. The water front
they have called a Praya, from the custom at famous
old Portuguese Macao, forty miles away. A walk here
(and every one walks on the street instead of the side-
walk) is a kaleidoscope of dress and a College of
Languages. Here are good Scotch names like Mathie-
son; Japanese like Mitsui; German like Melchers; Por-
tuguese like De Mello; Netherlands like Stoomvaart
Maatschappij ; Parsees like Cawasjee Moosa ; and In-
dian like Matab. A European has just got out of
a Sedan chair, which, as rain is threatening, has the cur-
tains down. They are dyed in the familiar yin-chi, or
Chinese red. The Hok-Lo bearers are ringing the coin

15

on the pavement to see if it is good and if a slight tip
is not given them they proceed to berate the unsuspecting
passenger in their twangy dialect. As the coolies walk
off, be sure to notice if the right leg of the trousers is
rolled up and the left down. It is a frequent sign of
membership in an anti-dynastic society, such as the Triad.
Their trousers are of hard Nanking cloth, which has been
dyed black with gambier. Here are Koreans with tiny
black bamboo-fiber hats, perched on their rolled up hair.
Their baggy white trousers flutter in the wind; their
Eton-like tunics are tight. A Taoist priest comes along,
wearing his hair on the top of his head and not down his
back, as most Chinese do. An Episcopal bishop passes
in regalia which concedes something to the East, while
he remains reminiscent also of the Occident; a sun-topy
crowning a black morning coat, knickerbockers, silk
stockings and pumps. His Catholic confrere, who is a
Portuguese by blood, wears the familiar long black gown
of his ilk and a cross, but notice his sun-helmet and that
his beads are of native jade. Belgian monks, who would
crucify the flesh, stick to black Friar hats which focus the
actinic, merciless rays of the sun upon their devoted but
dizzy heads. That gaunt gentleman under a gray Fe-
dora is the best shot in the colony. He has just beaten
the governor at the traps of the Royal Gun Club in the
Wanchai gulley. He is known as a " manufacturer's
agent," but darkly it is said that his real business is the
smuggling of arms into China. Anyway, as he is only
a cooce (Australian) he is given the cold shoulder
at the English club on the Praya. When he and a stocky
Canadian there get mad about it, they chum and rub
" Paardeburg " into those whom they call in the hour
of their wrath " snobs," " Pharisees " and " Little

16 THE CHINESE

Englanders." The Frenchman who overhears it all
says:

" Mais en guerre,

" De meme que freres ! "

As your 'rickisha rolls toward the Polo Ground at
Causeway Bay, Chinese boys turn pin-wheel somersaults
and pipe forth a petition for " cumshaw." One of the
four carriages of the Colony passes along, drawn by tiny
Chinese ponies. It contains the powdered and carmined
wives of a native banker of Bonham Strand. There
comes a Dom from India, his tall, thin limbs swathed
tightly in a white chadar, which answers for garment
by day and bed-sheet by night, and his head (all but the
black buffalo eyes) is hid beneath a tremendous red tur-
ban. With eyes averted from the Dom a couple pass,
Jyotishi Essabhoy — a silk merchant once of Calcutta —
and his wife, who wears a wonderful one-piece silk sari,
which is caught at the waist and half-looped around the
body. The other half is thrown over the head and
shoulders. She was born in Ceylon, where all the
women learn the carriage of a Venus of Milo from the
habit of bearing water jars on their heads. Soft is her
walk and voice, which latter purrs along with the subdued
answers of her lord, whose race has never learned the
confident manners of those who are used to ruling others.
Following, is an Indian officer of the Baluchis, whose
march is as stately as a column from the Taj Mahal.
You can tell that that other tall, independent-looking fig-
ure, swathed in white from turban to turned-up shoe, is a
Mahratta from Bombay, for if he were a Hindoo from
Benares his dhotee cloth would be gay in color. Shorter
than either, comes another, his hair dressed with tortoise

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 17

shell combs. He hails from Ceylon and wears a comboy-
skirt of checked cloth, and by trade is a vender of ame-
thysts and precious stones. Truth with him is a pearl
of great price, and he therefore indulges in the cheaper
imitations when he deals with the inexperienced. A Bur-
man, tattooed and looking afraid, steps by in ladies'
shoes and putsoe skirt, but he has a man's voice, which
disillusionizes you. There, too, goes Chang, the coolie,
with his string of goats, which he milks at the doors of
his customers. On the wet stone steps in front of the
Fish Market, labors with the pitch baskets one who has
been a pirate on the Si Kiang, and who dipped his hands
in white man's blood when the Sainam was attacked.
He will gather water-front news for a season, unless the
lukong of the law meanwhile recognizes and gathers him.
Japanese courtezans from Ship Street, dressed in their
blue-figured kasuri cloth, shuffle by on wooden shoes.
The Chinese folds greet them with Abderian laughter,
screaming " pig " after them, and the Japanese sailors
are ready enough to fight with knives on the pretext of a
harlot for the honor of a flag. A Hebrew, who wor-
ships at " Othel and Leah," on Robinson Road, drifts by
on the wind behind the only cloud of whiskers east of
Calcutta. He is one of the daring few who wears a
derby hat instead of a topy. A chimney-hatted Parsee,
looking very confidential in black, and sporting a pink
ruby of faultless water, passes with his secrets of what
fine English young gentleman (all too forgetful that in
this blistering climate a European can be imprisoned for
debt) owes him money, and his nervous fingerings and
whisperings are doubtless a part of the process of mental
arithmetic. The Parsee has progressed in the far East
since the days when he sat on a cotton cloth on the floor

18 THE CHINESE

and ate his food from a plantain leaf or a piece of Ben-
ares brass.

The mansions of Belilios on MacDonald Road and
those of Mody and Chater are the show houses of
Hong-Kong and the Colony has no citizens who equal
their generosity, a pretty touch of personal sentiment for
the king who has noticed them, warming their public
acts. They are few in numbers, these Zoroastrians, but
an unusual fire burns in their minds and hearts, as well
as in their worship. A people of no country, it is mov-
ing indeed to hear them sound with a sonorous earnest-
ness and sweetness the words " our home," when refer-
ring to whatever land in which they have cast their lot.
A people of no God, in whatever alien scene, at even they
climb the hills to follow with worshipping eyes and re-
signed mien the fast dropping orb of the sun, which now
is life-giver and anon their destroyer in the hour of death.

It is against the law to traffic in lottery tickets, but that
oily Fong, whom you see slipping in and out of European
hongs, has a choice assortment of crisp green tickets of
the Han-kau, Macao and Formosa lotteries, and for a few
extra cash he will also sell you the lucky tip on the draw-
ing, which divination he procured for a consideration
from a top-knotted Taoist priest. Tall Sikhs, wearing
the red of the king, march by as straight as fir-poles,
while a stocky little Welsh " Tommy " remarks : " Ts
long pipe-ligs might beat hus hup the first 'ill, but 'ead be
flat-blowed in the second valley, when we'd be strong
going the third 'ill ; it ain't ligs, it's wind."

With a privileged swing of the free arm, a stamp of
the off foot, and a cry, " Look out for your heels," red-
liveried coolies bluster by. Everybody looks; it is the
British governor of Hong-Kong being borne in the red

Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong, South China, showing side-
walks under second stories of buildings so as to
afford protection from the sun.

Looking from mountain road down the slopes of Hong Kong upon

mountain-encircled harbor and British settlement of Kowloon,

on the mainland of China. British and German cruisers

and torpedo boats in offing. Union and Christ

Episcopal churches and British Governor's

residence in left foreground.

Hong Kong, Western section, built on the slopes of Mounts Victoria
and Davis. British cruiser " Talbot " inshore. This vessel
saved from drowning the crews of the Russian war-
ships " Variag " and " Korietz," sunk by the
Japanese at Chemulpo in 1904.

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 19

chair of a mandarin. Remember that the natives them-
selves do not use the word " mandarin " (which is Portu-
guese), but " Kwun." Red of a brighter shade is used
only for Hwa Kiao or bridal chairs. I saw a crowd run-
ning to Blake Pier to see the only citron-yellow sedan
chair in town; it was for the late emperor's brother,
Prince Chun, now regent, who was on his way to Ger-
many to apologize for the murder of the German ambas-
sador. Every foreigner whose salary is above seventy-
five dollars gold a month retains a passenger chair, which
is carried by two or four coolies, who are uniformed as
conspicuously as purse will allow. Caesar in an effort to
extirpate effeminateness among the patricians, prohibited
the use of litters, but the excuse eloquent Hong-Kong
could offer is that it is more hilly than Rome.

During a royal procession the Chinese guard, which
patrols the line of march, turns volte face, for it would
be intrusive for a soldier to look upon the royal chair.
Only members of the royal family may use yellow sedan
chairs. How quickly the Chinese Club of Hong-Kong
got the ochre pot to work, when they heard a royal prince
was coming ! Only royalty may have borne before it the
flag with the five-clawed dragon; the people must use a
four-clawed emblem. A yellow Lo, or state umbrella, is
carried before the procession. You will notice that the
Chinese gentlemen and their clerks are vigorously fan-
ning themselves, and the fan is more used~ by men that
women. A Chinese not only fans his face, but opens his
long silk tunic and fans his body, or bends his neck to fan
his back. The fan is carried in the back of the neck and
protrudes over the shoulder. These cheap paper fans are
made at Nanking, seventy thousand people deriving their
livelihood from the manufacture. The Hakka boat peo-

I

20 THE CHINESE

pie could never get on without fans, for their fires are
made of charcoal in a pan, and when meals are being pre-
pared the children stand by on the poop and vigorously
work up a draft. But the oddest use is when a host or-
ders his servant to fan a seat so as to cool it for the guest.

Where one's pores, in a most humid temperature of
ninety-five, perforce do much of the work of the kidneys,
it is highly important that washable white clothes should
be worn. A few martyrs to convention deserve renown,
however — the governor's secretary, who is doomed to a
plug hat and Piccadilly frock-coat, and the aide-de-camp,
in braid and pilot cloth.

The Chinese, especially in the West End, is in all the
glory of his habitat, and is an unexpectedly dignified en-
tertainer of the many voluble or alarmed looking Occi-
dentals. He has his own splendid banks, like the Yuen
Fung Yuen on Bonham Strand, and native hospitals, like
the Chung Wah. He frequently loans to the British a
countryman as lukong, who is forthwith dressed in that
wonderful mixture of mushroom-shaped, white bamboo
helmet; blue tunic; engineer's white leggings and native
felt soles. Who is that peddler whirling a strident rattle
around a bamboo stick, and carrying a chest of drawers ?
He is the embroidery vender. Every girl and woman
decorates her own shoes and a visit of the peddler of silk
floss and gold and silver thread is a daily necessity. A
gloriously carved bright red chair, decorated with king-
fishers' feathers, is borne along. It contains a bride and
everybody laughs. The chair is kept for nothing else at
the livery. China, beyond all lands, revels in colors.
Native youths in long gowns of blue, buff and purple;
Chinese women in tunics and trousers of yellow, red,
black and gold ; and Hindoo women in the flimsiest pink

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 21

silk from the bazaars of Calcutta and the downiest shawls
from Cabul, make a joyous scene on the wide Praya and
hill-side roads of the oddest tilted-up Colony in the world.
Occasionally a Eurasian, stouter than either European
or Chinese, and whose blood kinship neither boasts
of, with hair hanging loose, passes by, to the un-
heeded shame of the foreigner. It is an evidence of
the vast passive virtues of the Chinese that they
do not rise up and behead every foreigner in the
Colony as an offering of vengeance at the feet of
the unnamed.

To cool his prized Waler under a noble tamarind,
and a cynosure of all eyes because of the unusual sight of
a fine animal, an English officer of the Indian army mess
jumps from the saddle, all jingling with the parapher-
nalia of occidental war. He has removed his heavy topy-
helmet, which is filled with cool plantain leaves, and is
ornamented with a blue- and white-barred pugree. Per-
haps (for he has lots of time) he philosophizes how signs
of subjugation soon become cherished customs. The
queue of the Chinese was first a badge of Manchu author-
ity imposed upon the conquered; and the Indian pugree
was originally the yoke which the Mohammedan victor
placed upon his Hindoo subject. It is the only handsome
feature of the absolutely essential but hideous Indian hel-
met, now coming into universal use in southern China. I
have noticed that in Marseilles they are numerously worn
in the summer months, which is the result of the example
of France's returning Tonquinoise colonists, who use that
port altogether. Topics are beginning to be exhibited in
the show windows of Broadway hatters' shops in New
York City. As an additional protection against the sun's
rays, the British authorities compel their regiments, on

22 THE CHINESE

oriental duty, to wear a strip of flannel down the spinal
column. The Oriental's respect for his native sun is
strikingly illustrated in the statue of Dai Butz at Kama-
kura in Japan, where the head of the saint is covered with
brass snails, which in their art represent a cool protection
from the heat.

In Hong-Kong and the Orient, water is king. It
rules for happiness and safety during the short rainy sea-
son, which commences in May, when lavish cloud-bursts
fall, as they can do only in the tropics. It tyrannizes by
its stinginess during the dry season of nine months. Im-
agine the bases of a dozen conical untenanted hills, one
thousand eight hundred feet high, traced around with a
cemented trench. Every drop of water that falls on the
hill preserves is eagerly caught and led to the basins in
the valleys. But the consumption, and particularly the
waste, by three hundred thousand Chinese in Hong-Kong,
is immense. In the broiling summer, the valves are
opened only night and morning, and there is great priva-
tion and danger in a colony which is subject to the rav-
ages of smallpox, typhoid and every other disease that
unflushed filth breeds, — not to mention the discomfort of
limited baths where the body sweats without ceasing.

The richer Europeans flock at five o'clock to the harbor,
and in launches seek out a spot where the sewage of Can-
ton does not lie like false lilies on the wave, to enjoy the
refreshment of a dip and swim, returning at seven
o'clock, when the sudden sunset flames without heat
for a glorious half hour, before night, without a
twilight, falls suddenly black. The launches are
abundantly provisioned with tea, whisky, soda, col-
lation, and cigars, and if the native launchmen could
speak with the metaphors of our literature, they would

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 23

certainly call us a race of Clodii from all the ap-
pearances. The swimming parties leave the Queen's
Statue pier for Shelter, Junk or Lighthouse Bays,
except when rumors go through the Colony that a
shark has been seen in the waters, and all the terrible
tales of Hong-Kong becoming as dangerous as Sydney's
harbor are told to the terrified griffin. The alarming
visitor is only the Peh-ki, or great white porpoise,
which has wandered a little from his fishing grounds on
the Macao flats for a dash among the shipping and bays
of Hong-Kong. Nevertheless for a week the stream of
launches that nightly left the Matshed Pier at Victoria
Statue will turn their noses toward Sham-Shui-Po Bay
instead of Junk Bay. The rivalry of the launches on
the long sail is thrilling; national, guild, district, social,
and professional feeling all coming into the competition
of ten knots speed. Junk Bay at low tide affords the
grandest bathing. Not only is the scenery stupendous
and the loneliness primeval and alien, but you can leave
the cooler water of the bay for a hot fresh-water bath
in a sand basin at the top of the beach, which has been
heated by the tropical sun all day. Luxuries truly
Pompeiian !

Wherever, among the unpreempted hills, there may be
a spring, the thirsty Chinese place bamboo runnels and
lead the trickling silver to the roadside, where patient
coolies \vait in line for hours to secure their own or their
master's drinking water for the day. The bottling
(really jarring) and shipping of potable waters is not
unknown in China, which land, after all, is really the
universal inventor. Near Sam Shui, on the West River,
is the large Ting Wo monastery, which is built on the
cliff's side. Above it is a waterfall, which the bonzes de-

24 THE CHINESE

clare is sacred and possesses healing powers. They ship
the water all over the country. If there is anything a
Buddhist priest loves as an adjunct to prayer, it is a little
of such a dignified and easily run business. The Taoist
priest is not so exacting that the business shall be
dignified.

Water is Tyrant! When he comes again, he falls in
unruly torrents, which sweep away the bounds of cement
and granite which have been placed for him; he drops
over cliffs, and you would not know the arid peaks in this
new land of thundering waterfalls that leap, echo and
roar in the narrow gulleys with the alien voice of terror
and destruction. Visible tongues of water appear from
out the awful mist, which darkens even a tropic day, and
rolls from valley to valley, disguising and anon revealing
every scene.

Droll enough to a stranger, but terribly important to
a resident, is the item in Hong-Kong's Government Bud-
get entitled Rat Estimates, where many thousand dol-
lars are appropriated yearly to battle with the rodent.
Hong-Kong has nearly conquered the mosquito by ce-
menting, in the woods, every gulley and indentation that
is near a dwelling, but the rat of subterranean secrecy is
harder to reach, and it is the fad or fact in Bombay,
Tokio and Hong-Kong to find in him, and the elusive flea,
the transmitters of the virulent bubo bacillum. The first
sign of plague in Chinese villages is that of the rats leav-
ing their haunts, leaping around mad and suddenly drop-
ping dead in the streets. Then as surely as the pursuer
of Pharoah, comes the Destroyer. Some say all this care
is as futile as offering rewards for rabbits in Australia
or wolves in Russia; that the treacherous natives breed
the pests for the bounty. At all events, it is not uncom-

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 25

mon to see a wily-eyed coolie carrying a dozen live rats
in a wire cage to offer to the sanitary board in the bal-
conied yellow building which rises over the Parade
Ground, and who, like every hunter, takes his reward in
the silence that clothes the brave. Nor is rodent immi-
gration permitted; every steamboat and foreign launch
that ties up to the Praya has to submit to funnel-shaped
tin guards being placed upon its lines, so that if Mr. Rat
intends to come ashore, he must not do so furtively, but
decently, as any first-class passenger, down the main gang-
way, where his credentials will be passed upon. But this
is the only restriction at this free port, where everybody
and everything comes sometimes, which is the unique
characteristic of this truly entertaining port. .The na-
tives are much opposed to the dreaded white-uniformed
Sanitary Corps, whose members break into the plague-
infected houses with disinfection oven, sprayers, brooms
and tubs. Lau Chu Pak, in a memorial to the govern-
ment, calls the corps " those Rat Kings, because of their
arrogance in dashing in and out with what they have
destroyed, while the owners, in convict-like garments
provided by the board, watch with sad faces the touching,
and for them, impoverishing scene." So a beneficent and '
wise government, even at the ends of the earth, has its
caustic critics.

Another abhorred feature of government is the lime-
washing, which effectually destroys the micro-organisms
of plague, enteric and cholera, which may settle upon the
walls. If an outbuilding is suspected of harboring dis-
ease it is sprayed white by the Sanitary Corps, which cus-
tom adds not a little to the picturesqueness of the Chinese
villages which lie beneath the banyan and tamarind trees,
and on the terraces of the black disintegrating granite

26 THE CHINESE

hills, and green slopes. Such a requirement could not be
followed inland in China proper, because the natives fear
spraying with white, which is their color of death.

Government also pounces hard upon the flour shops,
where fokis are re-bagging cheap flour in bags of su-
perior brand, and many a war waves to and fro in the
courts as to whether the Three Combed Cock was in the
Red Bamboo bag.

In the " chit " system, the Colony rebels at the sug-
gestion that it is not walled off from all the world. It
takes three months to establish your identity. There-
after all your purchases are signed for by I. O. U.'s, or
" chits," which are torn out of the merchant's stub book.
No one carries the money of the British or Chinese
realms, which happens to be Mexican silver, — it is too
heavy. Even at the hotel bars, you do not pay for your
liquor when it is drawn for you, for obliging Sam Lin,
whose legend is that " Heaven's smile, like his own, is
wide," hands you an account-book in which you are asked
to make your own entry. On the irregularity of the
writing, when the chit is presented, hangs many a tale.
Once a month, the various merchants bring these signed
chits to your hong comprador or cashier, who de-
ducts them from your wages or account, and the balance
is brought to you, together with the canceled chits. Thus
every firm's cashier acts as the private banker of the em-
ployee. No interest is allowed or charged, but if it were,
the credit would be on the side of the patient, kindly Chi-
nese. These compradors are of course heavily bonded
to the firms or companies. They act in a sense as the for-
eign firm's Chinese member, and handle all the diplomatic
dealings with the natives. Their association or club is
one of the most important sureties of business stability in

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 27

each Colony or treaty port. The word " hong " literally
is a row, and was first applied in the old days of inter-
course with Europe, to the dreary line of windows in the
foreign warehouses at Whompoa, near Canton. It is
now used to cover a firm, as well as its building. The
word " Taipan," used for the chief of an office, comes
from " Tai-poa," a village headman, or non-commis-
sioned mandarin.

The premier event of the year, so far as Europeans in
the Orient are concerned, is the ball on St. Andrew's Eve,
which would make it appear that the merchant princes of
the East are Scotch. St. George's Hall is hired, — it is
half of the artistic City Hall. Lanterns are hung around
the stone verandas. The tramway to the Peak an-
nounces that there will be a two A. M. car, and special
cars at a heavy premium all night. The three silk hats
of the mildewed Colony are sought for and brought forth
out of a maze of fungi. Everybody else, who hasn't a
tartan, goes in full dress, but wears a steamer cloth cap.
The admiral furnishes a string band from his battleship.
The British " General Commanding in China " furnishes
brass pieces, and the Indian Baluchis send over their
pipers from Kowloon, for they have been practising
Strathspeys, Caledonians and Eightsomes for half a year
in preparation for this event. The cellar is turned into a
free wine-room; the theater is turned into a supper-room,
and haggis struts upon the stage. A company in a cor-
ner of the room are two-stepping to the music of the
Eightsomes, and a fluttering comment goes through
the hall : " There romp the Americans ! " Ladies are
contested for in a manner which ruins Chinese good opin-
ion; there are a dozen tartans and a half dozen uniforms
and dress-suits fighting for the card of Miss Anaemia, and

28 THE CHINESE

divided dances prevail. The officers of the society don
their kilts and wear a sprig of heather received in the
last mail from home by " P. and O." steamer. Here is
the brilliant scarlet of the Stuarts, and the greens and
blues of the Gordons and Murrays. 'Rickishas and se-
dans camp in blocks and in the aisles between, the coolies
crowd and express undisciplined delight to see Europe
in finery pass by to the gala scene, and they jeer all they
dare at the exposed shoulders of the women. The hot,
moist air holds the perfumes.

For a week previous, practise dances have been held at
five o'clock, so the sets are all ready for rivalry and tri-
umph. There is a dais and the " Distinguished Patron-
age " will mount it, though the merchant princes are
somewhat sarcastic that the governor has the interests of
the Chinese more at heart than those of the British mer-
chants, but this has always been the keen question of for-
eign colonies, from Syracuse to the Congo, Macao and
Hong-Kong. The navy looks the manliest and has the
nonchalance which is popular, but it carries no women.
So the army rules the ball, for the officers of the garrison
are paid extra allowance for " keep " of families when on
foreign service. A German admiral, a French one, and
an, Italian man-of-war captain come and bring their staffs.
It is worth leaving Saigon with its transplanted opera, to
attend the great ball of Hong-Kong. It is hot between
dances, and you lean over the balustrade of the veranda.
There's an oriental fragrance rising from the smoking
joss-sticks which the coolies below have lit to drive the
mosquitoes away. A lazy and nearly naked fellow is
lying asleep in your sedan chair. You vow that if you
are sober when you get in it, you won't lie back and take
your ease as you used to. Down the hill at the water's

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 29

edge a dozen launches are puffing at the pier, waiting to
return the officers to their ships. Laughter is growing
louder in the cellar, and everybody's wife is left to her
circle of a dozen men friends of her husband. She is
in good hands, and he seeks relief with a hundred like
himself in the cellar, where a hasty but gushing bar has
been installed. The punch counters, however, are erected
on the ball-room floor. .These colonial women drink
less during evenings than mornings; the men seldom
drink during mornings, but the evenings are very moist.
There is perhaps a famous " Forlorn Hope," called the
" Ten A. M. Cocktail Club," which wends its way across
the blistering white Praya to the Hong-Kong Club, but
that belongs to the business day, and has nothing to do
with this ball. There is something about the moist,
dreamy tropic night which bids you stay ; the flowers and
ferns give out a heavy perfume, which the tropic sun
would burn up. These are the hours the festive Colony
loves, for it can then forget for a while the fear of who
will be the next to fall a victim of sun, plague, cholera,
typhus, malaria, or death-giving Bal-Tse fly. The day
after St. Andrew's rises upon a deserted Colony so far
as Europeans are concerned. They awaken to philoso-
phize that the abstemious virtues of the Saint and not his
popularity were meant to be followed, and the Chinese
overrun the Colony with an expansive smile and similar
quotations from native wits who acquired this sort of
wisdom before Noah.

Hong-Kong is a dozen higher and grander Gibraltars
clustered together. The fortifying of, and the road-
building to the strategic heights are rapidly and secretly
progressing. Tunnels are being bored, and the rocks
still unmasked by fir-trees, both on the island and China

30 THE CHINESE

mainland, facing Junk Bay and the wide Pacific, are
beginning to bristle with guns. Garrison life at these
outposts is unusually melancholy; society is impossible,
as the fortifications are eight miles by water from the
city, and communication over the mountains is arduous.
It is not a question of which is the better of the two, but
which is the worse, to be of the British Garrison Artillery
or the Chinese Lighthouse Services.

Here and there are introduced interesting touches of
the conservatism of the old country, for instance, the
Ciceronian motto: " Esse quam videri," over the door
of a steamboat office. The boats are Scotch-built, and
indeed " better than they seem," though the appearance
is surprising enough in this outlandish country, where
no such luxurious accommodations for travel are expected
on the heathen waters, which wind between the idol's
hills.

The siesta system has not taken hold of busy Hong-
Kong in the manner that it has at Bangkok and Saigon.
At Bangkok, offices are shut from twelve noon till two-
thirty p. M., and the only things at work in the street are
the rasping vultures, which have swooped down on some
unfortunate buffalo, which has fallen in the white road.
At beautiful Saigon, the work of the Europeans begins
at seven-thirty A. M., and continues till ten o'clock ; then
every one repairs home in his pousse-pousse (jinricki-
sha), has a bath, a light meal, and a sleep during the
intense heat of five hours, when even the glorious per-
fume of the ylang-ylang trees becomes a stifling misery
of cloying sweetness, all too suggestive of the flowers of
death. From three p. M. to five P. M. the offices are
again opened. At five p. M. every one (the majority
being officers of the Infanterie Coloniale), with all the.

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 31

exotic accoutrement of the joyous boulevardiers of Paris,
goes driving in miniature victorias or mababars, behind
tiny black Tonquinoise stallions of marvelous vigor, along
the red roads, and God help your eyes if it was noon, for
the glare is worse than the flame of Japanese trenches.
How sane the French abroad are in matters of comfort!
No one in Saigon ever dresses in anything but white,
whether for opera, promenade, business or social tea.
But at British Hong-Kong, the black broadcloth dress-
suit is donned every night for dinner, in a climate which
is nearly as hot as that of Saigon's; the hours of work
are continuous, and this British Colony therefore takes
vitality out of its citizens more than any port of the
Orient. Its line of invalids and derelicts who have fallen
back for repairs, is a long one, and not all of them reach
Glasgow, or even Chifu, Yokohama or Colombo, before
the chill ghost-order " Halt " is all too willingly obeyed
for ever.

A word in passing on Hong-Kong's architecture, which
is the grandest in the far East. Not one coign of van-
tage has been missed. The whole city is tilted up from
the water's edge at an angle of twenty-three degrees un-
der the triple guardian peaks of Wanchai, Victoria and
High West, which soar one thousand feet higher than the
highest street. The building material is generally brick,
double-walled for coolness and also for strength against
typhoons; covered with plaster of local manufacture,
called chunam, and faced with granite which is cut by
hand in the Kowloon quarries across the bay. At regu-
lar distances apart stand four magnificent Renaissance
piles on the water's edge : the Hong- Kong Club ; Queens,
Alexandra, and Connaught Road Chambers. Swinging
round to the right and left of the official city of Victoria

32 THE CHINESE

for nine miles, and rising eighteen hundred feet in ter-
races, and deep into Wanchai, Victoria and Glenealy Gul-
leys, creeps and spreads the imposing panorama, all the
more striking because you did not expect it at the world's
end. No factory chimneys soil the view ; they are hidden
around the curves at the extreme ends. There is a rich,
canopied Corinthian monument to one whom the Chinese
call the " Black Queen of the White British," Victoria
in bronze, and a Clock Tower in Spanish style. For fifteen
hundred feet upward, trees wave everywhere, and if you
desire complete details of the buildings, you must climb
to them. Above that height the peaks are bald, and take
every color in the changing light. In the delicious early
morning they are blue ; growing to gray, and in the still-
ness of the hot noon their climax is as white and insuf-
ferable as the sun itself. Then they change to gray,
green, purple and gold again, as the sun dies quickly at
their crests, from whence you will first view two of the
glittering stars of the Southern Cross. The diamond on
the breast of all this pomp is the Catholic Cathedral on
Caine Road, twelve hundred feet above the water. It is
Gothic, with a Spanish effect in the squat tower. Con-
spicuous are the great flying buttresses, and .very beautiful
is the stone canopy over the entrance to the Nave. All
this stone carving was done by Christian Chinese ; at least
they said they were on pay days. Christ Episcopal Ca-
thedral on Battery Path is a West Indian or Colonial adap-
tation of Gothic. The stucco has turned yellow and blue
with time and damp, and there is no place in the island
where that fern and tuberose smell of the tropics is so
prominent, as here under the tower of Christ's. Mt. Aus-
tin Barracks frown down fifteen hundred feet of cliff;
across Victoria Gulley, which is five hundred feet deep,

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 33

the admiral's residence holds a similarly lofty perch, while
beyond Wanchai and Wong Nei Chong Hills, scores of
peaks serrate the unnamed and uninhabited sky-line of
this grand, grim island, which holds in leash the three
heathen seas for England. There are other things placed
fifteen hundred feet high, which could announce them-
selves with devastating thunder, but there is not a sus-
picion of them in the view. They are the masked forts
which command the unfortunately many landing beaches
on the south, and the Green Island and Lyee-moon Passes
to the inner harbor, from the West and East respectively.
The new courts on Des Voeux Road, and the Naval,
Civil and Tung Wah Hospitals on Kennedy, Barker and
Robinson Roads, are as impressive as anything of the
kind in Europe. Whole rows of buildings of hand-cut
granite line Queen's Road Central. The domed Corinth-
ian pile of the Hong-Kong and Shanghai Bank, with
L'Opera at Saigon, are the two finest buildings in
European design, in the Orient. Against the granite
grandeur of the double pillars of the former, are set
double rows of royal palms, and across the way is a
glorious unbroken bank of ferns, forty feet high, crested
with centenarian banyans. The City Hall, containing
the Royal Theater, is a worthy nucleus of the ambitious
civic architecture. The sidewalks are unique in that they
run under the protruding second stories of the buildings.
The effect is not as threatening as the overhanging Eliza-
bethan buildings of Eastgate Street, Chester, or the
umbrella buildings of old Rouen, as the second story of
the Hong-Kong buildings is supported with pillars which
are anchored to the street curb. The use of stucco per-
mits of adding to line the joys of color. There are many
yellow, blue and buff buildings which close the eucalyp-

34 THE CHINESE

tus, tamarind or palm glades with a wall of color which
is delightfully oriental.

Government barracks, severely plain and warlike, are
set in extensive stone-paved courts, so that the collection
of stagnant waters under windows shall be impossible in
this habitat of malaria. The buildings all provide ve-
randa space by the use of double walls. Behind a charac-
teristic fence, half iron and half stone, which you associate
with British barracks whether at Halifax, Bermudas,
Malta, or Hong-Kong, is a cemetery in miniature, " for
pets of the garrison." As the Colony has only one street
or praya on the water level, there is an endless necessity
for stone bridges and revetment walls. The opportunity
is taken advantage of in a manner not surpassed along the
Riviera, and the happy Chinese has loaned to the Saxon
strength of wall, his ideas regarding the inlaying of tile
fretwork and coping of colored porcelain. The Hindoos
have raised a beautiful white and canary-yellow temple
and the Musselmen have erected a characteristic mosque
and minaret.

Sumptuous and commodious homes, all of an Italian
sameness, and every brick, stone, tile, and beam of which
has been laboriously borne up the mountains by coolies,
are planted on the ledges about Wanchai, Victoria and
Glenealy Gaps. Some day the gaps between the re-
maining twenty peaks of the island will also be tenanted.
Most picturesque are the zigzag paths, which certify that
the chair with four bearers is an indispensable adjunct of
hill residence. Over Victoria Peak, facing the south, is
perched the Hill Chateau, or so-called summer resi-
dence of the governor, in a land which is all summer.
In design it reminds you somewhat of Chaumont; a truly
ducal dwelling, but, oh, so melancholy when friends shall

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 35

have gone down the lonely path homeward, and only the
wide, purple, heathen Pacific, with its unreal calm, un-
flecked by a sail, in view in the morning. The home of
the Royal Hong-Kong Golf Club, whose Augustan motto
is Festina lente (Make haste slowly), is a worthy ex-
ample in miniature of the genius of a talented local
architect, Turner, who perpetuates that grand old-
fashioned art spirit of refusing any contract, however
lucrative, if the work must be ugly, a spirit which would
foam with civic rage to behold that chimney-building of
architectural brutality lately erected opposite Trinity
Church, New York. The vast Belilios Mansion, with
its many domes, reminds one of Byzantine Constanti-
nople. In his old home on Victoria Peak, this Parsee
gentleman built an aery outlook where the view sweeps
over a thousand heathen hills, with many bays between,
while the immediate seat delights with familiar Grecian
lines. Surprisingly only one house in the city, that, too,
owned by a Parsee, uses lace-like iron grilles in place
of windows, in the delightful hacienda fashion of Havana
and the hot towns of the Caribbean. Truly this Hong-
Kong builds with a taste and confidence, which have
made her architecturally the boast and crown of the
whole Orient. Britain has never colonized anywhere and
in her style of building given any intimation that she ever
meant to recede.

Not only the houses are handsome, but the walls and
gardens beneath your feet appeal to you along Glenealy
and Peak Roads, which are so steep that the attraction
is physical as well as odorous. All this is Saxon. A
word for the Chinese type. On the Kowloon side of
the water, in the bay where Admiral Keppell practically
won Hong-Kong from the herded junks, is the delightful

36 THE CHINESE

old joss house, double-roofed, with blind walls. Study
its proportions, its ridge, curling eaves, and the use of
color on the outside frieze. Then, most beautiful of all
is the Joss House at Causeway Bay; such feathery mul-
lions in the dainty windows which relieve the heavy
wall; such lavish color; — the arches, the squat pil-
lars beneath the circular balcony, the tiny door ap-
propriately narrow to let only the secrets of the soul slip
out to Heaven, and, of course, the opalescent tiled roof,
which is made the most conspicuous and beautiful part
of the building in Chinese architecture, while we degrade
it. The natives declare that we Occidentals are sinners
to expose what is ugliest to the view of Heaven (Tien)
andi keep all the beauty of walls to our little selves, as
though we had no hills where we might climb and see our
faults therefrom. The native coolie has his own names
for the streets : Victoria Statue Square is " Black Empress
Place " ; Queen's Road Central is " Typan's Chow House "
or "No. i Jade House," because the Chinese Club and
the best native jeweler (Wing Cheong) are located
there ; Caine Road, where the Catholic Cathedral is situ-
ated, is " Foreign Devil Joss House."

Imagine the entertainment to interject in this modern
city a characteristic procession of the Orientals, such as
that of the dragon lanterns on the evening of the first full
moon. The mythical dragon, called a " lung," combines
the powers, virtues and characteristics of the popular
animals; its belly is soft as a frog's; it has scales like
a carp's, claws like a five-toed hawk; a palm of a tiger;
neck like a snake's; eyes of a rabbit; brow of a camel;
horns of a deer, and ears of a water-buffalo. The pur-
pose of the procession, to a degree, is one of exorcism.
Hundreds of silk lanterns, sized over with a seaweed

Palatial double-walled residence of foreigners on Victoria and Kellett

peaks. 1600 feet above Hong Kong. South China.

Famous Peak Hotel in left background.

Mountain-chair, four bearers, used on peak roads of Hong Kong
Island, South China.

Lovely Shameen Island, where foreigners live, opposite native city
of Canton, Pearl River, South China.

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 37

glue, are tied to a long painted back ; a wonderfully real-
istic lantern head and tail are attached, and poles like the
feet of a centipede hold up the national monster. The
crowd catches these, and the glittering, swaying, writhing
animal is borne through the city to the accompaniment
of drums, tom-toms and fire-crackers, for if evil spirits
hate anything in China as elsewhere, it is public attention
being called to their presence. From the Yamen's eaves,
in the native cities of the mainland, you will behold the
flaming beast slowly gliding around the corners, and a
Milky Way of lanterns following to the foot of Pagoda
Hill.

On the ninth day of the ninth moon (our fall) the
newly arrived European in Hong-Kong is amazed to see
thousands of Chinese, gowned in their finery, climbing
the exhausting road to the Peak, and jamming the little
cable car which is hauled up fifteen hundred of the eight-
een hundred feet. If the silks and women were absent
it would certainly appear to be an attack deploying on the
governor's summer palace, Lawn Tennis Court and the
Signal Station. The same ascent is being made by the
villagers up every one of those tremendous feng-shui, or
nature-dominating peaks of the mainland, and broiling
work it must be with only the grass-cutters' paths and no
shade, for the Chinese long ago cut the trees from all
their magnificent peaks. Throughout China this reli-
gious ceremony, called locally " Chung Yong " (Ascend-
ing on High), is being observed. It is identical to what
our idea of the ascent of Ararat by the Hebrews would
be, if they desired to commemorate Noah's salvation from
the flood. The fete is one of the most beautiful in senti-
ment, and certainly the most picturesque of the many ob-
served by the Chinese. Joss paper is of course burned,

38 THE CHINESE

and tossed to the winds, and the boys bring their kites and
assail the heavens. It is one of the few occasions when
the betrothed among the young people have an oppor-
tunity to see one another, and we have very wilfully mis-
understood the Chinese on this subject. The same festi-
val is observed by the Cantonese, who leave the city for
the White Cloud Hills, where the highest peak is ascended
in honor of Cheng Sin, or Fairy Cheng, who has bestowed
good luck and safety, historically perhaps as far back as
Noah. In all these pilgrimages the Buddhist monks
throw their monasteries open as hotels.

When the European stranger takes his first walk on
the noble roads of Hong-Kong, one of the things imme-
diately to impress him that he is despite the architecture
in a land foreign to his own, is to see the Chinese urchins
standing under the banyan trees, with their long bamboo
poles, which they carefully work between the branches.
The boys are snaring cicadas with a glue which is made of
fir ashes and rice paste. This ear-splitting harpist of the
sultry day is a stubby insect with no beak and a body as
large as that of a mouse. The native children fetter them
with strings, and tie straws around their abdomens to irri-
tate the insects to make a constant strumming. They also
tie them up tight in foreign newspapers, and exult as the
insect, with powerful wings and jaws, bursts its way
through.

Whenever the foreigner is melancholy in his exile;
when his harp has been hung on the willows or tamarinds
for ennui, he may essay relief by taking a walk up Wynd-
ham Hill Road. It is popularly known as Flower Street,
for the road is banked solid with the baskets of the
native gardeners. In contretemps, the turreted jail,
where incarcerated Europeans (unless they soon die in

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 39

tropical confinement) are forced to make cocoanut coir
mats, frowns down from the top of the street. In the
damp heat one almost swoons from the perfumes.
Branches of fruit trees are sold for their spangles of
plum, peach or cherry bloom. There are baskets of yel-
low and white narcissus in February ; the peony, which is
the royal flower of China ; tuberoses stuck into hollowed-
out bamboos ; fragrant ' magnolias, camellias, and calla
lilies, which are waxy enough to attract the appetite. All
this of white bloom. In July there is the sacred purple
lotus, as big as a hat, and in fall, golden and pink chrys-
anthemums and red and yellow dahlias larger and finer
than we ever see at home. Twenty cents will buy what
we at home are able to purchase for twenty dollars. The
scene is not like that in gentle Honolulu, where the
Kanaka women sit behind the baskets and patiently wait
for you to choose. This is decidedly a masculine, and it
is going to be a strenuous land. The brown and nearly
naked flower-sellers raise their guild cries, and charge
you with a pannier. You have to buy to escape. Go
to their gardens and they will show you wistarias which
their great-grandfathers tended one hundred years ago.

Hong-Kong is a world-famous city of the Unroofed,
twenty thousand coolies having no place on which to lay
their heads each night, and even if they wished to pay
for a bed, the Colony has not been able to provide Crown
sites enough on the rocky terraces for buildings. On
D'Aguilar, Wyndham, Wanchai, Caine, Connaught, and
a dozen other roads, when the last chairs of the white
gentlemen-taipans are being borne by to their handsome
residences on the Peak, the first of the great class of the
Unroofed follow along slowly to find a spot of the stone
sidewalk in recess, or a pillar supporting the overhanging

40 THE CHINESE

second story, where to prop themselves, or to lie down,
for sleep. With a sigh, they drop to the pavement and
contentedly say : " Two meals a day, brother, but one
sleep at night, eh ? " On their backs, with knees up, and
hands under their heads for a pillow, they lie at Wanchai.
Against the precious teak logs which are destined to
undersheath American battleships ; against the sugar bar-
rels at Taikoo; the rope coils at Yaumati; and the gunny
bales at West Point, you can discover them in hundreds,
with a bamboo near each one, but not for protection, be-
cause no man can rob the naked. They are the steve-
dores ; the hewers of wood, drawers of water, and carriers
of rice and jute ; the men who, without the aid of steam,
put all the brawn against the spokes of Progress when the
new day opens. Against the blind wall of the jail on
Mosque Street, they are propped, — optimists they, who
say : " We are, after all, better off than those inside, for
the worst work is less than the lightest shame." The
Chinese lukong and the red-turbanned Sikh chowkidar
mark the regular patrol of British law, and could be-
labor every stretched out, upturned foot, but they for-
bear, in that sanity which philosophizes that " they are
torn enough already by honest toil/' Fellow sympathy
dims the eye of duty, and the steps of authority die away
as soft music upon the ears of the most weary of mortals,
whose workday is from dawn till dark for a pittance. In
front of the new flour-mills at Junk Bay, where the
heathen hills have first heard the hum of modern ma-
chinery, the dismantled sailing ship, Maple Leaf, has
been moored and her main deck has been roofed. On
the 'tween and main decks hundreds of hammocks have
been slung, and here the native mill operatives find a
shelter at least from the rains and night-dews.

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 41

An amusing feature of life among the Indian colonists
in Hong-Kong is their propensity, when unemployed, to
betake themselves to the Indian temple in Morrison Gap.
Free food is passed at the services, even to white
strangers. You are, however, emphatically commanded
to take off your shoes. There are always twenty to
thirty men loafing within the sacred precincts and a serv-
ice is called every time hunger gnaws. All is well until
rum is passed by some sacrilegious outsider, when war
rains from the dim clouds of religion, and Matab Singh
and his brother priests wear a worried look upon their
generally reposeful features. At the commencement of
the service the audience squats upon the floor. On a
platform performers sit in the middle of Kyee-wains,
dexterously swinging their sticks before and behind them
on the metal cymbals. The music begins low, but in-
creases to a tremendous noise, to which is added the clap-
ping of hands, until the swaying worshippers are worked
into the religious intoxication in which they delight.
The foregoing applies to the Hindoo. The Mohamme-
dans among the soldiers have built a mosque and minaret
on the Chinese mainland at Kowloon, next to their vast
parade ground. The call of the blue-turbanned muezzin,
ringing through the hot oriental night, does not assure
peace of mind to the exile on the occasion of his first
sleep away from the home land, when the knowledge
comes upon him that he is indeed stranded on a foreign
shore, and that his ship is now steaming far away from
the harbor, bearing onward the last few white-men
friends he had made en voyage. Before long, however,
he himself will be in the motley-colored throng, admiring
the notable voices of the criers, and more contented with
his interesting billet in the hypnotic East.

42 THE CHINESE

Last summer, an amusing incident stirred the choiv-
kidars or Sikh police of Hong-Kong. A comrade who
had enlisted and grown comparatively wealthy in the
Panama police service, on his return to Hong-Kong, was
seen to drop a gold piece among his comrades' pennies in
the alms box at the Mosque. Immediately, like a simoon
across the Jetcha Doab of their home land, all the chow-
kidars marched up Wyndham Street on strike, and vocif-
erated that they must have their wages raised or they
would emigrate to the American El Dorado, where the
princely price of three dollars gold a day was paid to
chowkidars of experience, ability to roll diphthongs and
the letter "r," and to strike a salute which is as steady
as if cast in bronze. The Sikh in India is as disciplined
as clock-work, but in China he is a boiler of conceit with-
out a safety valve. Opposite Hong-Kong, on the Yau-
mati side, the one hundred and nineteenth regiment of
Baluchis was quartered. The Sikhs of the famous red-
barred Hong-Kong Regiment, now disbanded, who
were crazy to get at the Russians at Tientsin in the
International march, were never willing to respect the
Chinese, and the Baluchis have been equally undisciplined.
It is, of course, partly their caste prejudice brought to this
Mongolian land where there is no caste. These Baluchis
at last disgusted everybody by casting all the honor and
discipline of a king's soldier aside, and waylaying the
Chinese on the roads and in their shops, and robbing
them. It culminated in a great race riot on August 23rd,
which was the first Hong-Kong had experienced in a
decade. Swagger sticks and clubs were used by the
soldiers and bamboos by the Chinese. The thick turbans
of the Indians saved their heads, but many Chinese skulls
were fractured. Amusing scenes were presented, a thin,

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 43

tall Indian grasping a Chinese by the pig-tail, while the
stout Chinese was reciprocating by the equally gross in-
sult of unwinding the Indian's red turban.

On June nth the fire-walking ceremony of Thee-
miri takes place in the walled court which is connected
with every Indian temple. Weird, sensuous and ghastly
by turns it is, altogether leaving the taste of ashes upon
the mouth. The priests secure some plump young girls
among the devotees, but most of the thirty or forty are
toothless crones and haggard men. For days a fair
is held. Sleek Kling priests offer you tickets which are
torn out of a book in true modern style. Holy chupah
food and sweetmeats are passed, especially during the
playing of music. Incense thickens the air, but does not
exclude the knowledge of fluttering silks, glances of dark
eyes and the clinking of jewelry increasing on every hand.
Wood fires are lit, for by and by the embers are to take
the chief place in the orgy. A pool is dug and filled
with imported sacred water which is poured from kongs.
The devotees begin by bowing, crawling in the dust, and
dragging themselves around the temple. Stirred by their
cries of fervor and pain, the excitement grows, until it is
an easy thing to precipitate the crowd into a frenzy.
Every dark eye leaps now with unmasked fire, and every
dark skin becomes pallid; the clear-cut consonants of
the speech are chiseled even harder by the gleaming teeth
which crown the matted beards. Occasionally there is a
laugh, not of ridicule, but of tension too hard to control.
As the crawlers grow exhausted in their self-imposed
penance of dragging themselves over obstacles, bearers
step forward and assist them. Word is passed that the
first who fell out had fasted ten days, and early exhaus-
tion is taken as a proof of piety. Saffron robes are now

44 THE CHINESE

donned by the remaining performers; more priests come
forth and surround the gods. Swords are drawn and
limes are cut at as the performers turn a double-somer-
sault. A cocoanut is thrown on a brass salver, and a somer-
saulter deftly cuts it in two and spills the libation of milk.
The first of the exhausted devotees throws up his arms;
they are lashed with thongs. Saffron dust is thrown
upon those who endure, and they are considered as thus
" cleansed of sin." The embers of the fire are now spread
beyond the devotees, and the gods are carried across the
pool. A white goat is brought before the idols and is
beheaded. By this time the devotees are in a white heat.
They are loosed by the priests; they rush over the coals
barefooted; they sweep through the gushing blood of
the animal, and dash into the pool, after which devotees
and spectators dance around the idols, the whole cere-
mony concluding by everybody taking the ashes in hand-
fuls and casting them into the air and over themselves
and everybody else. The Chinese Taoists of Fu-kien oc-
casionally practise a fire-walking orgy.

If the foreigner is a sportsman who prefers less dan-
gerous explosives than Scotch-and-soda, he has the no-
blest game at his door, for tiger-shooting is possible not
far from Canton and is abundant in the long fissures in
the rocks at Amoy and Fu-chau. The natives hunt the
animal fearlessly with antique weapons and home-made
powder. The heart of the beast is eaten, as it is esteemed
to be a courage-producer. The claws are sent to Hong-
Kong to be mounted in twenty-carat gold and sold as
charms. The skin, which is finer than the Indian ani-
mal's, generally finds its way to Russia.

There is excellent snipe-shooting no farther away from
Hong-Kong than Castle Peak and Deep Bays, along the

45

beaches under the towering brow of old Tai Mo, the
king mountain of all these peaks which roof you daily,
3640 feet above the water of the harbor. The favorite
name for the dominant peak of whatsoever range is Tai
Lik Shan (hill of great strength). Walk inland a lit-
tle way along the raised mud path between the rice fields
until you reach the clumps of banana and bamboo.
There you will find surprisingly good shooting of wild
pigeon, ortolans (rice birds), teal, wild goose, partridge,
and noblest of all, the pheasant in his habitat. When
our forefathers were using the catapult and crossbow,
the Chinese were making powder on the following form-
ula, and the peasants still use the fizzing stuff within spit-
ting distance of the tiger's teeth: three catties (a catty
is one and one-third pounds) of ground rattan charcoal,
the expense of which can be understood, for it means so
many baskets destroyed ; three catties of saltpetre ; ten of
sulphur; all wet with kaoliang spirits, and stirred to a
paste over a low charcoal fire, and afterward dried on
paper in the sun. This powder of course dirties the gun
barrels abominably, and before ignition has to be packed
hard with the ramrod. In Yunnan (the honey land),
tigers, leopards, wolves and even elephants afford the
king sport of China and perhaps of the world. At
Tientsin, trained eagles are used to hunt pheasants and
hares.

The British have not interfered with the custom of pur-
chasing servants, or technically, slaves. All the well-to-
do native families of Hong-Kong buy at Canton girls of
eight years of age from parents who have been reduced
by poverty resulting from persecution or opium. Nor
has the government with whole heart and open eye set
itself against the works of the traffickers in the souls of

46 THE CHINESE

native girls. The custom is only rife at the treaty ports,
where the foreigner has taught the wealthy young Chin-
ese to neglect the example of his fathers and the rules of
his religion which prescribe an early marriage. The pur-
chase price of an eight-year-old slave is fifty dollars ; of a
courtezan slave of eighteen years, three hundred dollars.
A deed is given to the purchaser and the parents are pro-
hibited from visiting their child. The idea is not similar
to adopting a daughter, for in the latter case no deed is
signed. Sometimes in extreme want due to famine, the
impoverished one will engage his most precious posses-
sion — his son — to his creditor for a stipulated term of
service, or a ransom, but papers must be signed whereby
the creditor assures the safe-keeping of the child. These
things shock us, but suffering has worn off the edge of
shame in the minds of the Chinese poor. The act is
deemed meritorious in the victim, who serves for his
parent's debt. These contracts in the case of girls, run
from the eighth to the eighteenth year, if there is a saving
clause that the daughter is not to be sold into prostitution,
and at the expiration, the parent may arrange a marriage.
But if the clause is omitted, the child may be sold into
shame by the first purchaser. A promise of a change
seems to light the horizon. When Chow Fu was gov-
ernor of the two Kwang Provinces of the south, he rec-
ommended to the throne that the sale of girls should be
prohibited, and an Imperial Rescript was issued. The
law is good enough; the point is, will it be enforced by
China when the corrupt parents decide to succumb to the
tinkle of the silver dollars offered by the depraved of a
treaty port ?

One of the sights of crowded Queen's Road East,
Hong-Kong, is the itinerant street barber at work on the

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 47

sidewalk, under the immense canvas signs of the tattoo-
ers' shops. When a customer has hailed him, the barber
simply drops his mirror-bucket and basket from his pole,
and he is at once set up in business. He finishes the pro-
cess by shaving the inside of his patron's ears and nos-
trils, and by giving the eyeball an interior massage,
which latter fashion accounts for the prevalence of
trachoma. A humorous customer, thinking he would
reprimand a careless novice who was shaving the inside
of his right ear, asked: " Are you at my left ear now? "
" Why, no, I have only begun on the right ear ; why did
you ask? " " From the pain, I thought you were pass-
ing to the left ear without taking the trouble to go
around."

Some of our occidental brokers are said to do business
in their hats, but the Chinese cobbler does his in his
basket. He sits on the road and hangs a few shoes on
a tripod as a sign. The repairs consisting of pasting and
sewing the felt, are done while Chan waits goose- fashion
on one leg.

The wealthy Chinese of the treaty ports have taken
joyfully to our electric (gasoline being prohibited in the
tropical south) automobiles, music-boxes and phono-
graphs, and if the last named plays piccolo or violin solos,
it will hold a crowd of thousands of natives under the
window. Hong-Kong boasts of two modern jewelry
shops, one kept by a German, the other by a Scotchman,
where the finest diamonds are on sale. The Chinese are
developing a connoisseur's liking for them. Of course
pearls have always been their prime favorites. Many of
the Chinese curio stores still advertise : " Kruger sover-
eigns on sale." These dull gold coins were brought to
the Colony by the transferred battalions of the Royal

48 THE CHINESE

Welsh Fusiliers and Derbyshire regiments immediately
after the South African war. The former regiment is
humorously remembered in Hong-Kong by the black tail
which hung from the collars of the tunics, as a relic of
the regiment's mourning wrren wigs were taken from the
troops. The Derbyshires, perpetuating the times and
territory of Robin Hood, where they are recruited,
sported a band of Lincoln Green on their forage caps.
Despite the fact that the new land furnishes them the
bread which the old land was unable to do, the Colonists
have not brought all their hearts with them, and find in
these little traits of the troops the reminiscences which
"drag at each remove a lengthening chain." Tele-
phones are in use in about eighty European hongs. The
wires must be nearly worn out by the fokis and native
office boys talking to their friends. When office hours
are over, even the chair coolies come in to learn and en-
joy the novelty, which they utilize at the top of their
high voices.

The newspapers of the treaty ports are generally set
up by Macaense Portuguese and edited by Scotchmen.
In Hong-Kong, a floating dot of the red Empire, some of
the finest leaders in our language are prepared, out of
pure pride in the profession, for the circulation of the
papers is not large, but the men are. Of course there is
no rush, as in New York or London, and possibly the
heat furnishes (though you would not expect it) hot-
house-growth to some of the finest English that is now
being written, something that it is a pleasure to compare
with the traditions of Addison's day. Hong-Kong is
not without its literary records and is boastful of those
pealing hymns of Christendom which Governor Sir John
Bowring wrote under these frowning heathen hills:

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 49

Watchman! Tell Us of the Night, and In the Cross
of Christ I Glory, as well as his famous literary cameo
on Macao: Gem of the Orient Earth and Open Sea.
China proposes that her Chih Ming Pu (Board of Col-
onies and Censorship) shall pay better attention to the
rapidly increasing number of Paos (native newspapers)
which employ many Japanese in editorial positions, and
whose bias often causes 'worry to the Manchu policy and
dynasty. " Wo sei lai liao " (the Japs are coming) —
says the Board.

What a striking change has for the time being, taken
place upon the once embattled waters of Hong-Kong
since the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the Anglo-Frank
entente-cordiale! Where once we daily looked through
our blinds upon scores of battleships like the Albion
and Glory; four-funneled flying cruisers such as the
Leviathan and Crecy; and low, swift, narrow, tel-
escope-funneled French cruisers of valeur Superieure
like the old favorites Montcalm and Gutchen, now
we see only a few river gunboats like the Moorhen
of two-foot draft, so as to be able to skim the creeks
which feed the Chukiang and feed the pirates from a
four-inch nozzle. There is one startling and epochal ex-
ception,— when the Japanese, as they police all the eastern
waters from Singapore to Hakodate, in the protection of
their new lines of commerce, send down those low gray-
ish-green gladiators of recent fame, the Asama, Nisshin
and Kasagi, and their enrolled captives, the Sagami,
Tango and Iki, whose high foreign lines show that they
were once the Peresviet, Poltava and Nicolai, which ves-
sels were raised from an average depth of sixty feet.
America alone of the white nations has maintained battle-
ships (at present two) in Chinese waters and the pros-

50 THE CHINESE

pective increase to a much larger fleet will act as the
best salesman for American goods. In the franchises
granted by their Wai Wu Pu, the Chinese reflect the
evidence that they are particularly impressed by these
demonstrations of the white powers, and England and
France in their anxiety to strengthen home waters politi-
cally, have in China lost to Japan certain ground com-
mercially by this action.

In a Chinese cradle, under the mysterious yellow robe,
really lies the commercial future of the Pacific States of
America. Shall it be rocked by a faithful hand, made
steadier because of the backing of a mighty fleet, or shall
the nursling be tumbled out to be Ju-jitsued, Bear-
throttled, or Stein-smashed? The fleet shall say.

The Chinese prophesy the political union of America,
England, Canada and Australia, with America the
spokesman of the union, because of their identity in Prot-
estant religion, speech and literature, and that this union
can alone save Australia to the white race from Japanese
absorption.

At Hong-Kong, blue jays and magpies (the natives
call the latter hi tsoih, jolly birds) are frequently seen.
The magpies mischievously chase the golf balls along
the Happy Valley course. During the rainy season, wag-
tails visit the waterfalls on Bowen Road, and when the
dry season comes they retreat to the deep stream which
runs from the Peak to Aberdeen at the back of the is-
land. Of course the gorgeous Yuen Yang (mandarin
ducks) are in their habitat, and at your comprador's
home you will find specimens in his courtyard — not his
back yard. In their heraldry surprisingly this bird of
gorgeous plumage has to be satisfied with seventh place.
Justice has however been done the golden pheasant,

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 51

which though allowed second place, really holds premier
position, as the fung-hwang is only a mythical phoenix.

The government's splendid botanical (they almost look
like hanging) gardens, set upon terraces five hundred feet
above the water deserve special mention. Tufted Nor-
folk pines of great height frame the view, and the scene
over the islands and blue waters is unsurpassed. As one
could expect, the palm section is as royal as Cleopatra's
retreat reset. The tea-flavoring jasmines, dahlias, tube-
roses, asters, kosmos, and azaleas give this land the
right to be called the Eden of Flowers. The whole prov-
ince of Kwangtung is a spangled meadow of violets.
The climate is so damp that no glass is used upon the
luxuriant fern house. Merely bamboo wands are nailed
on the roof and sides, to afford a chequered shade.
Heart of all the bloom, in the central fountain there is a
glorious display of purple lotus (Eichhornia speciosa).
Your Yalensian friend (a Chinese) hands you the
candied root and bids you realize Cleopatra's dream.
While you have been talking with him you can measure
the growth of that most exquisite of all perfumed flow-
ers, the Chinese sacred narcissus, and also the growth of
the giant bamboo. Notable among the flowering trees
are the purple Bougainvillea and the faithful Bauhinia,
which latter offers you garlands when all else of nature
sulks. The Hong-Kong gardens have not the magnifi-
cent Assam rubber trees, spice shrubs and other exuberant
growths of the Peradeniya Gardens of Cingalese Kandy,
or rows of such magnificent waringen trees as the
Buitenzorg Gardens of Batavia, but they make more of
what they have. For picturesque setting, there is
nothing in the world to approach them.

Mouse deer, under government protection, are becom-

52 THE CHINESE

ing so numerous in the Stanley and Taitam Valleys of the
island, that they boldly come over the Wong Nei Chong
Gap, and jump the blue walls of the Parsee and European
cemeteries on the Happy Valley Road, and do great dam-
age to trees and shrubs. Lamps have been tied to the
swinging branches of the trees, and the Chinese of the
iWash-house village near-by verily believe that our ghosts
are for ever unlaid, and it takes something steadier than
the Celtic temperament on our own part to investigate
the uncanny thing.

As clothes are never put on a line, but on the lawn in
China, the long, light bamboo pole can be used for dark
purposes. It is affirmed that at night, flags have flut-
tered over one's wall, and in the morning laundry has
been missed. So often has this occurred, that a native
who carries at twilight a pole with a nail in the end, is
arrested as a suspicious person, just as a lukong would
have a right to gather in on sight a Chinese whose queue
was greased. There is a custom in Hong-Kong of per-
mitting coolies to sleep on one's doorstep and sidewalk,
and thieves are often entertained unawares within stalk-
ing distance of their snoring victim.

The delightful house-boat trips which the Shanghai
sojourner may enjoy on the Yangtze, or the Soochow
resident on the Grand Canal, where months may be spent
at the cost of one dollar a day for four rowers, are denied
to the resident of south China, for the romantic West
River and the hundred and one branches between the Chu
and Sikiang Rivers are poorly policed, and subject to
piratical attacks. Not since the rule of Li Hung Chang
have these devious waters of Kwangtung Province been
safe, and how often have we of the south sighed for a
rule such as the mandarins of Hupeh enforce on their

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 53

waters. However in moving about the districts or Shens
of Kwangtung, the foreigner does not experience the in-
security which is felt in Fo-kien and Hunan Provinces,
whose inhabitants are the harshest speaking, roughest
mannered and most cruel of the Chinese. In Kwang-
tung we were terrorized in Shum's reign, and hope soon
gave way to renewed despair when Chow Fu succeeded
him. For a while the British gunboats patrolled the
waters, but this worked Peking and the more advanced
New China party into a turmoil, and then Britain with-
drew. We used to take well-armed tugs and make the
trips, but sleeping over the boilers in the tropical night,
with its sheets of hot showers, is not comfortable. The;
house-boat has no permanent roof; only a bamboo
support over which mats are thrown, whether for sun,
rain, dew or moon. When we spoke of the superstitions
of the Taoist priests, the Chinese would retort that our
Jesuit missionaries always called for the mats when the
moon was up. I found that this could be corroborated,
even among the Missiones D'Etrangeres men in Somali-
land and at Aden. Some of the boats are nicely carved
and lacquered, but for your peace of mind they will be
all the better for a simultaneous and reckless attack of
buckets of water and soda.

The supply of milk for the white man's infants, who
have only one-tenth of a chance for life, is a matter of
great concern in the treaty ports of the Orient. At
Hong-Kong, a small herd of acclimated American cows
are kept on a comparatively cool plateau twelve hundred
feet above the sea, in cement stalls, and grass-cutters are
sent into every shady nook of the valley and behind every
gravestone in the desperate search for green fodder, wiry
as it is. The value of the cattle is enormous because of

54 THE CHINESE

the frequent raids of the government to destroy such ani-
mals as have developed tuberculosis, murrain, anthrax,
etc. The dairies of Spartan Hong-Kong, speaking gen-
erally, consist of a can opener and your selection of Swiss,
Highland, Dutch, or American St. Charles labels, accord-
ing to whichever steamer may be in port.

Where the eastern seas bubble up hot to the flame of
an equatorial sun, Chinese workmen, with Scotch over-
seers, turn out six thousand ton steel ships and do battle-
ship repairing worthy of Woolwich or Devonport. The
dividend for 1907 was twelve per cent, after writing off
for depreciation in the past twenty years the unnecessar-
ily large amount of two million dollars. Hong-Kong
possesses on the mainland at Kowloon and Sham Sui Po,
five graving-docks of the Hong-Kong and Whompoa
Dock Company, which concern sixty years ago moved
from Whompoa Island, near Canton. One of these
docks is cut six hundred and fifty feet into the face of a
towering granite hill. With all the exertion of the
baronial Mitsui family of Nagasaki, and the other pri-
vate shipyard owners of Kobe and Yokohama, assisted by
immense subsidies and national preference, Japan is
still behind indefatigable Scotch Hong-Kong, in her
maritime product. To illustrate. A bid was opened at
Manila to build various sea tugs and launches. The
Uragu Dock Company of Japan submitted, for a tug
one hundred and forty feet long, twenty-six feet breadth,
draft thirteen feet, a price of $109,500. The Shanghai
Dock Company bid $105,376. The Hong-Kong and
Whompoa bid was $86,280. Situated on the island of
Hong-Kong, in the center of expensive Victoriatown
itself, is the new Naval Yard Extension, where a
battle-ship graving-dock and immense tidal basin, impos-

Carrying black brick tea from Yang-tze river boats to TokmakofFs

" Russian House," Hankow. Central China. River

rises 40 feet during Spring floods.

The environs of Canton, South China. The embrasured city wall
the famous " Five-story Pagoda," visited by every Ameri-
can traveller to China; the treeless hills overrun
by humankind continuously since Noah's time.

Where hundreds of thousands of people live on small boats. "Dutch
Folly" section of Pearl River, Canton, South China.

55

sible to be reached by shell, have been completed in re-
claimed land. At Quarry Bay, five miles farther east on
Hong-Kong Island, in a position however that can be
shelled over the southern hills from the sea, the Butter-
fields have cut in the rocky shore a dock seven hundred
feet long, and have erected repair shops, so that, at the
earth's extremity, are three ship-building and dock plants
(one government and 'two private) of modern equipment
and great size. In addition there are a number of Chin-
ese plants which regularly turn out ships of twelve hun-
dred tons burden, and install in them copies of European
engines. The enforced extension of official Hong-Kong
is being carried on by expensive reclamation from the
sea, on a scale which is equalled at no port in the world.
The money is provided by Parsees. One whole praya,
six miles in extent, is thus being added to the front of
the island. Across the harbor, on the mainland of China,
bays are being filled in, so as to afford sites for factories
and native tenements, for surly granite nature has here
turned everything on edge on a more gigantic scale than
even the Titanic upheavals of our own Greece. By this
I mean to say that if the white man means to stay in
southern China he must build for himself a foothold from
the bottom of the sea.

Coal is brought from Wales and Australia at a cost of
six dollars gold a ton, and stored under water as a re-
serve for the Admiralty. The carbonic dissemination
from the piles as they lie exposed to tropic rains and suns
is extravagant. Kyushu Island in Japan mines most of
the commercial coal used in that great port, though it is
surprising to learn that India sends one hundred and
thirty thousand tons a year of her Bengal coal to Hong-
Kong.

58 THE CHINESE

betray. Let the curious therefore debate whether it was
ether, hypnotism or mere luck six times unbroken.
Those who had studs stolen were of no use as witnesses,
for there was no recovered gold to identify, but Blass was
witness enough, and the Indian got as fair a trial as a
white man. We think less of Sikhs now, but Rasul
Singh, behind the jail walls on Mosque Street, thinks
more of us.

Crews for all trans-Pacific ships are recruited at
Hong-Kong. The Chinese of Canton is the best disci-
plined and most tractable of all sailors. He never rushes
on shore to get drunk; he stands without flinching, even
better than an Aden Arab, a heat which, south of Cancer,
fries the pitch out of the deck seams and the marrow out
of human bones ; he never detains the vessel after its sail-
ing hour because he is lingering ashore, and he never re-
quires the irons to be clapped on him at sea. If he goes
crazy he goes overboard without telling you of it, and
killing a man on the way. He seldom moves his bunk,
signing with the " samee olo ship " year after year, and if
he does leave it is because of the Confucian law requiring
three years of mourning when a parent dies. The white
mates manage the sailors through a native bo'sun or
" Number One man." They ask only one privilege, that
of gambling with their returning countrymen who have
made money abroad, and tawny Jack never fails to see
that his landlubber brethren pay due toll to his Neptunic
lore. All the way across the calm Pacific, the fo'c's'l
head, and the battens of number one hold are checkered
over with the cards, chips and cash of poker, pai-lau, fan-
tan, and other heathen games. When the typhoons blow,
or when life-boats need to be lowered for men overboard,
the Chinese act with such coolness that one's confidence

•FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 59

in them is established at once. The blue-gowned wait-
ers, with their long queues swinging dangerously near
the soup, may not be so popular with the traveler, but on
deck these machine-like, silent workers of the East lend
assurance to the long, tedious voyage of twenty-eight
days across the Pacific, when one takes the southern
route.

At Hong-Kong you will notice that when the 'tween
deck ports are thrown open to the stevedore's men who
come alongside to take delivery of the quarter sacks of
flour, bamboo sticks are used in the tallying. The crim-
inals among them must twinge when they recall that
these are the same tally sticks which the judge at Canton
counts out and throws down to indicate how many lashes
the culprit shall receive. Not a few of the Hong-Kong
laborers are deserters from justice at Canton.

As soon as a mail steamer arrives in the busy port,
dozens of smoking steam launches crowd alongside, and'
the first to board the ship are the native boarding-house
runners from Elgin Street, who are soliciting returning
Chinese emigrants. The health officer is helpless; the
emigrants toss ropes over to the launches and the runners,
with the agility of monkeys, clamber up the sides of the
ships and over the bulwarks. The crews look like
pirates; they are half naked. On their wide straw sun
hats are painted the names of the houses, so that the emi-
grants, looking over the rail on the scene below, may be-
hold the merits of their temporary abiding places before
returning to Canton on the morrow. Many of the
signs read: "Fine Gambling," "Auspicious Welcome,"
" Heavenly Thought," etc., the philosophy of all of which
the fleeced emigrant will probably have cause to recall on
the morrow eve. \Yhen the steamboats, such as those

60 THE CHINESE

from Canton, berth at the few wharves during the night,
these boarding-house runners carry lanterns with the
same signs emblazoned on them. The overturning of
one of these lights caused the great steamer Han-kau
holocaust in the early morning of October I4th, 1906,
when four hundred Chinese were burned to death in
their sleep, and a $300,000 cargo of silk consumed.

The Chinese Imperial Customs under Sir Robert Hart
and Robert Bredon, Hong-Kong and even Macao, have
done something to light the ancient coasts of south China.
As the exile walks along Barker Road in the gathering
dusk toward the Wong Nei Chong Gap, he beholds Wag-
Ian in the south, flashing out an intermittent signal but
reminding him in comparison of the more frequent safety
appliances of our home waters. Looking to the north, a
weird sight is presented in fall along the flanks of the
mountains which frown over old Kowloon City, Junk
Bay, Yamati and Hang How village, and the Lyee-moon
Pass, which shut in the scene. A low running fire sets
them off into the buttresses and towers of a heavenly city.
It is the grass-cutters, who are thus fertilizing their
mountain pastures of wire grass. The hills are composed
of a progressively disintegrating granite, which supports
only a coarse grass which kills sheep, but the natives use
it for pig fodder, fuel for kindling and for vase kilns,
fertilizer, baskets and bedding. The tremendous rains
wash away into the crevices even what little loam does
accumulate. The Hakka grass-cutters are a fiery lot, and
the government has been slow to step in and prevent the
destruction of the imported Scotch fir growth which
would in time redothe the denuded hills.

The Colony is visited often by the enlightened native
lady, Mrs. Wu, wife of the famous minister Wu Ting

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 61

Fang, and sister of the eminent Doctor Ho Kai of Hong-
Kong, who is a colonial legislator Westminster would be
proud of for his attainments and zeal. It will be recalled
that Minister Wu years ago practised as a barrister before
the British courts of Hong-Kong, where he was born.
His wife, so beautiful in her quiet and sweet dignity to
every one who saw her in the Colony and on shipboard,
has shown that high thoughts and a great heart throb
behind her unassuming mood, or is concealment the won-
derful way of a Celestial? She has given Hong- Kong
a great hospital, called the Ho Min Ling, for the women
of her race. Government provided the site. Already a
native hospital existed in the Tung Wah, whose officials
surprise foreigners with the avidity with which they send
for the bones or bodies of even the obscurest Chinese emi-
grants who die at sea. " Prince or pauper, he is a Chin-
ese, and the same worship is paid him by a loyal son."
There are besides, the large Civil, Military and Naval
Hospitals, and the private Peak Hospital, but all are not
too many for this tropical station of sickness where fevers
fight for ever under their yellow banner of " No Surren-
der."

Old Kowloon City, (whose translated name is " Nine
Dragons," owing to the nine overhanging peaks) across
from Hong-Kong, is beginning to draw the feet of anti-
quarians. There is, of course, nothing like the higher,
wider scene which appals the ordinary imagination in
the north, where the Great Wall climbs peaks five thou-
sand two hundred feet over one's head. The wall of
the ancient city of Kowloon clambers between the boul-
ders of the valleys and over several hills three hundred
feet high, which were encircled and used as redoubts.
The wall between the angles uses more stone than appears

62 THE CHINESE

in the construction of the Great Wall in many places.
These Hakkas evidently did not believe in jerry contrac-
tors, when the safety of their city was to be tested. The
guns have been dismantled and cast about the ramparts
by the British with the same intent that induced the As-
syrians to sow salt and tares in the fields of those whom
they had conquered in citadels but were not so sure they
had conquered in spirit. On the way from the shore set-
tlements to both old Kowloon and Yamati, the govern-
ment has cut some remarkable roads through the yellow
loess. It packs well, and if you did not test the walls,
,you would conclude on sight that it was an engineering
work which had cost millions. With what a feeling of
security once on one of these night walks above the native
settlement of Hang How, we came across a British cor-
poral's guard stationed by a four-point-seven gun on
the dark road ! Hundreds of coolies had dragged it part
of the way up in the daytime, but it was too valuable a
government pet, — this pointer-nosed beauty, — to be left
unguarded, out in this picturesque southern China, where
the white man, while he talks mannerly to his yellow
neighbor, still keeps his powder dry.

As the curio-hunter saunters into Kruse's, or Kuhn
and Komor's, Hong-Kong, a creepy feeling possesses him,
in his illegal search after hara-kiri swords, scimitars from
Borneo, and dahs and krises from Java, that a Sikh po-
liceman is watching him with hypnotic eye through the
windows, to see if the store is selling swords in a colony
where arms are interdicted because of the overwhelming
native population.

When the hot summer swoops down upon Peking, the
foreign resident goes to the cooler hills of Patachu,
twelve miles away, and the residents of Kobe, Yokohama

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 63

and Seoul have relief within a few hours. Think of a
commitment for a seven years indenture to an island,
where only three places (and those water level), can be
reached over Sunday. This is the experience of most of
the Anglo-Saxons who contract for service at Hong-
Kong. Canton, once known by the Joshuan name of
Yang Ching (city of rams), affords the longest trip.
This is the city of the empire where it is said every new
thing and luxury germinates; where excitement always
runs high and box-top orators abound ; where the myrmi-
dons of tax farmers flourish, and if it does not equal Nan-
king in literary culture, it is the Athens of China in con-
ceit, and the Paris or Kyoto of China in art productions.
Take lots of money, for the stores will tempt the tightest
fist The boat sails from Hong-Kong at eight-thirty
A.M., before foreign life is astir, but long after the alert
Chinese have opened the day with firing of crackers and
burning of joss paper on the high sterns of their junks.
The wharf shed on the Praya is about the loudest in de-
sign that can be imagined, and would frighten any Ostend
resort of the most bizarre aspirations. But once aboard
the modern boats Fatshan and Honam, one is de-
lighted that the comforts of a Boston steamer are af-
forded in so remote a country, with the additional unique
feature of armed Sikhs patrolling the hatches. The first
part of the trip is in landlocked British waters, frowned
over by lofty Victoria, Castle and Tai Mo Peaks. Many
islands, some of historic interest in the annals of Euro-
pean commerce with the Orient, dot the stream. Half
of the native names have happily been retained. Shek
Wan Pen is contiguous to Deep Water Bay, and Castle
Peaks overlook Cap Sui Moon Pass. First comes Stone-
cutter's Island and then Mah Wan Island. It is alto-

64 THE CHINESE

gather captivating when the captain mixes his new-found
learning of the east with your old world names. Little
white villages of stone are scattered as far up the great
peaks as terraces can be cut to support life, and the foot-
hills look like patterns in plaids with the varied green
of the small garden patches which are unbroken by fences.
Melancholy Lintin Island is passed, with not a house or
tree, and only a few cellars remaining on it. Who would
believe that in 1830 it was covered with the stores and
homes of men of our race? Great bays five miles deep,
open up, and the receding tide uncovers to the waders
edible seaweed, shell-fish and eels. Bloated bodies and
heads bald in front drift by, carrying tales of the mur-
dered and the beheaded, and the tails of the men them-
selves in the former case, — the terribleness both of dis-
order and order in uncanny company. When you are
half-way to Canton, the estuary narrows to the Bocca
Tigris (Tiger's Mouth in Portuguese). All about are
rice fields, banana plantations, and plots where the canabis
sinensis is cultivated for the famous buff and blue grass-
cloth. A thousand canals communicate with the East
and West Rivers, the most of them extending from the
central Pearl River to the West River. Many of them
are navigable for the tugs one finds in Hong-Kong
waters, and I recall some keen experiences when we fol-
lowed in the wake of the government cruiser which was
catching pirates, and tossing their heads into baskets on
the top of bamboo poles, as a deterrent of crime. Soon
we pass Whompoa, where the first foreign dock was lo-
cated, and where Russell's famous American tea-clippers
used to drop anchor. Whompoa will come into its own
again and make Hong-Kong tremble because of a rival
greatness.

65

Then Canton the ancient and wonderful, Canton the
brains of China, comes into view. The wharf is in the
old city, and it is necessary to take a dirty sampan to
reach the European's island of Shameen (literally " sand
face" because of its beach). Across a dirty canal, the
Sha Kee Street of the native city faces you with its
myriad signs. The government proposes to reclaim land
in the canal, so as to make this street two cheungs (thirty
feet) wide, — something very lavish for South China.
Everywhere the boat population surges on the waters,
probably three hundred thousand people thus finding a
home along the famous Pagoda anchorage. What a con-
tretemps ! two marble Gothic shafts of the French Cathe-
dral, where the French and Belgian priests officiate, robed
in Chinese costume, spring from amid the low wilderness
of tile roofs. The only other tall objects are the square,
unwindowed pawn shops; a pagoda or two outside the
walls; the towers for detecting fires, and a smooth Mos-
lem minaret, one hundred and eighty feet high, which
has stood for five hundred years. The temples are only
two stories high, and are hid away among the squat
houses. In the zigzag streets, made so for defense
against pirates, and also devils who can not turn a corner,
with their many steps (for the Great Wall set the prece-
dent that grading should never be done) a guide is in-
dispensable. They wait for you under the palms at the
beautiful Victoria Hotel at Shameen. One dollar Mexi-
can silver a day is the fee. Your chair with four bearers
costs one dollar more, and one dollar will pay all fees for
bonzes who admit you to their temples.

The city has a market history since the eighth century,
and is easily the premier city of China. It decidedly is
the metropolis of the country, as New York is with us,

66 THE CHINESE

and it may eventually be the capital if the Manchus are
overthrown.

How many places there are to go : the shops of those
who inlay silver with kingfishers' feathers, whose work
each day brings them that much nearer to blindness ; the
Chy Loong ginger works, which have candied sweet-
roots for you and me since we were boys ; the Tung Shing
sandalwood and ivory carvers; the shops of the jadestone
polishers; the Chun Loong matting works; the shops
where artists paint on ivory and rice paper ; the Yan Kee
tea burners' works ; the Edible Birds' Nest market ; silk and
embroidery shops on Sai Loy Street; the fragrant cam-
phor-wood coffin shops just beneath the Tartar wall,
where the horsemen ride with panoply of antediluvian
war; the venerable Water Clock dripping down the mo-
ments of centuries which knew not our white-men's poli-
tics ; the lazy beggars on the steps who do not even ask an
alms, but trust to their professional distortions and their
hypnotic eyes to attract pity. The less said about the
gaudy Hwa Ting or Flower Boats, and the fan-tan
shops, with their huge lanterns along the Chung Sun
Street in the western suburb, the better. There are tea-
houses, like so much driftwood, on the water's edge, with
some loose life, bad music and gorgeous robes. A meal
there of rice, cabbage, pork and bean fixings costs the
dandy three and a half cents. Signs of the Crescent here
and there show where Mohammedans have their bath-
houses.

The Hwang Han Temple is remarkable for its ex-
pansive tile roof and two miniature pagodas in the great
stone courtyard. Not much can be said for the Em-
peror's Temple, which is taudry and modern in style.
He never visits these temples, and the citizens therefore

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 67

spend only enough money on him to conform with the
law, which prescribes a place in each of the provincial
capitals for the Emperor to worship the One God. In
the Fa-ti Gardens, clipped chrysanthemums wear porce-
lain heads and hands.

The little ancestral chapel of the Tsang Clan is alto-
gether delightful, from an architectural point of view
particularly, and partly from a sociological considera-
tion. Two great beacons of three tiers flank it. The
railings, friezes, grilles, eaves, the ridge ornament par-
ticularly, and the wing chapels are as delicate as the best
occidental taste could prescribe. The modern ancestral
temple of the Chun Ka Che clan, outside the walls, is
more elaborate and the costliest in China. This is the
part of the country where a merchant prince dares laugh
at the idea that the throne may not be vied with in osten-
tation. The fretwork of the balcony exhibits the richest
specimens of carving. The general chasteness of line
found throughout China is here lost in too much deco-
ration.

The Temple of the Five Genii on Great Market Street
has a beauty of pillar, a lightness in poise of double roofs,
and a length of vista through the halls, that appeal to the
imagination instantly. There is little carving and you
desire none. You have found what only genius can con-
ceive, proportion, and it is no more plentiful in China
than in other lands. The Buddhist monks have set out
royal palms on the terraces to fit into the general scheme
of columns approaching the cloisters, and the illusion
that Nature built the temple easily ensues. A balustrade
with pink tile frettings, completes a picture of line and
light, so that it is hard to say whether etcher or painter
would best essay it.

68 THE CHINESE

The curious can go to the Nam Hoi Magistrates'
Yamen, where the prisoners are on view in cangues and
chains and the unconscionable rascals are the only Chinese
who like to be photographed. The Green Tea and the
Swatow are the best known of the Guild Halls. Even
the beggars here have their Guild Hall. An amusing
advertisement of one of the Canton hotels confesses the
more of the general conditions : " This hotel is entirely
free from obnoxious odors." The rent of the best shops
is low enough, but tens of thousands prefer to carry their
shops on a bamboo over their shoulders. A Canton adage
needs no explanation : " Get rich with a taxless basket,
for the tax-gatherer sucks a shop as dry as an empty
shell." The hucksters can not carry signs, so they
yell their wares, each in the note of his Guild. The bar-
ber's note is like a cicada's; the cobbler's like a cat's;
while the umbrella man storms like our Themistocles
when he roared above the fleets of Salamis. I think a
Chinese has the shrillest and strongest voice in the world,
and can make the wryest face in ejecting it. But he is
quite capable of exhibiting the most infectious smile at the
first sight of humor. He shows all the indications of a
healthy, well-poised mentality. Two chair-bearers,
jostled into by two coolies who are carrying a great load
between them on a bamboo, sho.ut back most filthy lan-
guage concerning the mothers of their assailants. Noth-
ing daunted, the latter retort : " Mo mi ma wo peen "
(Go on, you tailless horses), which is the most insulting
name a draft coolie can be called, and a trail of laughter
follows in the wake of the jeered. Everybody else, in
the height of manners, is extending the usual morning
greeting, " chih kwo fan" (have you had rice), which
answers to our " how-do-you-do " salutation. The

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 69

peddlers are in force; they chiefly visit the homes of
foreigners with their baskets of porcelain, jewels, silks,
furs, and jade. We remember one of the wiliest who
used to bring white fox furs which we suspected had lain
too long in the pawn shops, until the fur was molting,
for they have no cold storage system in the south of the
empire. He would leap like a jumping-jack and vo-
ciferate: " No slake (examine) 'em first; you makee buy,
then can look see," which was all too good for himself.

The umbrella mender; the cutter of wood seals or
" chops " ; the itinerant banker with his strings of cash,
the load under which he was groaning probably not being
worth over six of our dollars; the shoe-man shouting
" straw sandals one cent a pair ; " the leaping or yellow
cookie man, for they keep in China the yellow of their
eggs while they send us the albumen in crystals; the
dentist with his pincers and a string of his horrible con-
quests; the medicine seller with his dried snakes; the
seller of che (sticks of sugar cane one foot long), — all
hurry along with an eye searching one way, and a voice
the other, for "good luck pidgin," or the first bargain of
the morning. A guided company of the blind in Indian
file, with their hands on one another's shoulders, pass near
the wall and murmur " kou lun" (for pity's sake, a
gift!). The streets are so narrow and sunless with signs
that the lantern-maker, the fish-man, the dyer, and the
housewife all dry their wares on the tile roof, where
possibly a small tree may be growing in the ancient col-
lection of dust in the gutterway and spout. The fruit
vender will not sell you the orange with the skin. He
sells the skins separately as a flavoring for boiled rice or
for preserving. The professional story-tellers gather
crowds as dirty sugar gathers flies. If you listen you

70 * THE CHINESE

will conclude that the reciters have memorized from un-
expurgated editions of popular novelettes, and also added
a dressing of their own. The lantern and balloon seller
is in tremendous difficulties, and has the pain of Atlas
on his brow and shoulders, for while his long pole lifts
his wares above the crowds, it is for ever bumping into
the forest of street signs. Here is a fresh-faced country
boy carrying his baskets of water-cress. His feet are
covered with sores, for the water where he works is none
too pure. There goes a band of strolling musicians, out
to earn a day's honest wage, blowing furiously on sangs,
scraping on tikins, picking at pipas and banging at los.
A barber, when he has nailed a customer, backs up to the
wall, for " if cutee, no payee." Every one else traffics
in the jostling crowd. Look! there steps a mandarin
from his chair toward the Yamen's steps. He affects a
walk with feet set very far apart, just such as you see
copied by a certain class of the jeunesse of the army as
they take an airing down the platform at the Horse Guards
Parade Ground, London, or at our own Presidio; it was
learned in China!

One never sees fisticuffs. Now and then an urchin
spits at a foreigner's chair and shouts, Fan kivei lai
(See, here's a foreign devil), but his ears are cuffed by
the first shopkeeper who can reach him, especially if the
American monitor Monadnock; the British gunboats
Algerine and Moorhen, or the French Styx are in
port. Coal bearers, corpse carriers, idol bearers, all
join the rout of the barefooted, but outside of their
voices these millions pass in silence along their smokeless
streets; no wheels, no hoofs, no bells, no whistles, no
leather shoes. What a difference between the street
scenes here and in Peking, the capital of the north! In

Canton, the capital of the south, there are no animals or
carts in the narrow streets. In Peking the most striking
features of the street life are the trains of double-humped
Bactrian camels and the springless Peking passenger carts
in the wide streets. Step ten paces off the street in
Canton into the first temple court, like the Hwang Hau,
and the hush of the longest recorded centuries of this,
our poor earth, immediately closes about you, as though
your soul had dropped into space. You who have never
thought before in your own land of excitement and
danger on the streets, suddenly are awed in this exile
among the heathen by your own mind turning about,
facing you and saying: " We never met before." This is
what you will never forget. This is what you can truly
say for ever: "I discovered my identity; I accepted my
responsibility in fear in China."

Who are these little Cantonese? Up the Fu-kien
pirate coast ; up the scented Yangtze ; up the shadowy Si
River; along the marshes of Malaysia, or under the iron
cliffs of Liaotung, always keeping within sound of the
thud-thud of the screws of British gunboats, has followed
the greatest abettor of British power and British prints,
the peerless Cantonese middleman, the real civilizer of
the East.

The second excursion is to Macao, of which we will
relate separately, and the third and last trip available to
a Hong-Kongite is that up the West River (Sikiang).
The sternwheel boats Sainam and Nanning leave
Canton for Woochow, two hundred and twenty miles
away, three times a week, making the journey in thirty
hours. The river was opened to foreign trade as far
back as 1897, but its beauties are only lately coming into
fame with us. The Chinese have always appreciated

72 .THE CHINESE

them, but this is not the only thing we have learned they
have been concealing. " Concealment is Nature's first
measure of safety, and half of a man's wisdom," says
their proverb. Where the North River and Fatshan
Branch join the West River at Sam Shui (Three Wat-
ers), which you easily mispronounce and say " whisky "
in Chinese, the most beautifully wooded headlands reach
into the water. It might from all natural appearances
be a bend in the Ottawa. Stone temples peep from be-
neath the trees and you conclude that the Chinese, who
do everything opposite to us, do not place their best archi-
tectural creations in cities, but on hills, in woods, or
beside the waters, so that beauteous Nature may be a
propitiator between God and man, for they say true love-
liness and sin can not exist together. As you sail into
the broad waters of Woochow reach, and the moon comes
over Pagoda Hill, and glistens on the porcelain tower,
you have something lovely to remember for ever, and con-
clude that a country can be beautiful and a man patriotic
in any language.

One of the stops is called Do-Shing, and you wonder
whether you are in Devonshire or along the Danube, until
you separate the name, Do — Shing. There is no
journey equal to the first part of this trip in affording
opportunity to study Chinese life, for the villages crowd
to the water's edge. The Hudson, or the Danube at the
Iron Gate, can not surpass Shui Hing Gorge, with the
Marble Mountains, Seven Star Hills, and How Lek
Peaks, and their many pagodas towering over the water,
which is swollen with the summer's torrents. At Kam-
chuk the rapids run twenty miles an hour. The river is
more picturesque than the Hudson because of its greater
number of bends. One seems to be sailing into a wall,

One of the three most beautiful pagodas in China. The octagonal

" Flower Pagoda," Canton, 1000 A.D. Native house

of tile, stone, brick and cement such as built

in South China in foreground.

Cargo junks and small residence boats, where hundreds of thousands
of people live, Pearl River, Canton, South China.

The Old and the New — A modern steamboat brought in sections

from Scotland, anchored among the slipper boats and

sampans of Canton, South China.

FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 73

when suddenly a new reach is spread before the view,
with banks where sorghum, indigo, cassia, mulberry, tea,
banana, ramie, matting reeds, palm and bamboo grow in
varied colored luxuriance, not to speak of fields of that
most quiet of all green shades of nature, where the rice
and millet patches extend. Now the stream narrows to
a gorge, and the mountains again come to the water's
edge, and during the torrential rains of summer the bare
hills present thousands of glorious waterfalls. Then a
turn is made, and a lake covered with boat life extends
wide into the fields. A pagoda's thin shadow spears the
waters. Great junk sails seem to be moving through the
gardens, along hidden creeks, of course. Not all the
ports which you pass on the river can be touched at, be-
cause they have not been opened by treaty, and the in-
terdiction lends zest to the trip. Now and then a raft of
the precious giant bamboo is towed past by launches.
Along the Teng Yu Mountains, waterfalls glisten. De-
cidedly the most unique sight on Chinese waters is a
native passenger boat, with the great sweeps and sails,
working its crowded human freight up the stream. A
first-class ticket costs one-half of a cent a mile. There
is no steward's service, for every man eats from his own
lunch basket, or rather, handkerchief. At Kamchuk and
Shui Hing, the old capital of the province, buildings en-
croach into the stream on piles. A Chinese seems never
to be afraid of water or freshets, though floods, typhoons,
clumsy junks, and frail sampans are for ever taking a
terrible toll of death among this persistent, patient race.
Along the tow path on the right of the stream, human
trackers pull freight boats against the current. Tak
Hing, on the north bank, shipped you the matting which
is laid on the bedroom floor of your far distant home.

74 THE CHINESE

The marshes, where the reed grows, extend far inland.
Since you have at last made a call upon them where they
were working with a will for you, you will doubtless now
and for ever have a new heart for the little saffron
brothers who are knee deep in the water, whose wage is
twelve cents a day, and who, after paying their living
expenses, have as a profit on what they sell you, only two
cents a day left to save.

II

THE PORTUGUESE AND CAMOENS IN CHINA

"When Luther, iVVolsey and the Pope were the names
that clamored loudest in the world, a few swarthy Lusi-
tanian adventurers in half-decked caravels, had taken so
long a journey that the fame and luxuries of the old
world were of small import to them in their remotest
exile. From the yellow Tagus and Lisbon they had come
to the red delta of the Canton River, in China. The col-
ony exists to-day, and I found the dried-leaf charm of
the dim past clinging to the yellow and blue chunam
(stucco) walls of sunny Macao. The dangers of the past
are also a present reality on these, the most dangerous
waters of the world, from a police standpoint. A river
trip is spiced with the risk of piratical attacks. The
creeks and upper reaches of the delta, between the Chu
and Sikiang Rivers give refuge to nearly naked and
bronzed bucaneers, who frequently fire from the sorghum
brakes upon passing steamboats. All the native junks
which ply on the West River to the silk plantations, are
equipped with cannon of antique pattern, and hand-
grenades.

The handsomest steamboat east of Suez, the Heung-
slmn, leaves Hong-Kong for Macao at two o'clock, ar-
riving at sundown. The trip is to the mouth of the
Pearl River, and across more open water than the voyage
to Canton. Differing from Chinese and mediaeval cities,
for in the spirit of the latter it was partly planned, Macao,

75

76 THE CHINESE

filling up the end of a narrow-necked peninsula, is walled
only on two sides, the north and the south. The sea
itself, providing the moat on the east and west, has al-
ways proved to be the stronger barrier. The Chinese at
will have leaped the Porta Cerco wall, but on many oc-
casions the Macaense prevented the landing of the Dutch
along the eastern beach by the guns of Bomparto, Fran-
cisco and Guia forts. The city's incorporated name is
" Cidade da Nome de Deos, Nao ha outra mais leal " :
" City of the Name of God, most loyal of the Colonies,"
which honor was accorded it by Dom Joa IV., in 1642.
The Boa Vista is a castle-like hotel on the Penha Heights,
which overlooks the sixteenth century Bomparto fort and
the great half moon Praya Grande bay. It is the most
picturesquely situated and cleanest hotel in the Orient,
and has been a source of national jealousy between Portu-
gal, France, China and England. France has been en-
deavoring to secure it as an advance post toward Canton,
for if England ever takes the Yangtze basin, France is
going to demand the whole coast from Tonquin to
Fu-kien, including the two Kwang Provinces and Yun-
nan, to the capital of which she is now sending a railway
from Haiphong. The Boa Vista's fish and game dinners
are famous throughout the East. It also makes a spe-
cialty of Portuguese wines, from the light Colares to
golden port. The drive from the band gardens along the
cliffs to the Areia Preta bathing beach rivals Hong-
Kong's noble Jubilee Road, and both of these oriental
roads, hanging over the sea, surpass Nice's Corniche
Road in foliage and color. Through the productive, in-
tensively-developed Chinese truck-farms runs the wide
Avenida Vasco da Gama, as far as Mongha Fort. Over
Cacilhas Bay is the picturesque Montanha Russa Park,

THE PORTUGUESE AND CAMOEN'S 77

which is graded like a grassy volcano. All were built by
chained convict and impressed soldier labor. Few now
frequent these noble, highly maintained roads, as the
courtly dark Macaenses have drifted to Hong-Kong to
earn a livelihood, and the historic little colony, Europe's
first conquest in Cathay, is lapsing into merely a sanita-
rium and pleasure resort, from which place neither Manila's
Baguio or Hong-Kong's peak promise to displace it.
Macao's unique feature in this respect is the steady-
blowing through the hot months of the sou-west monsoon.
Should this breeze lapse for a moment, death would come
to thousands from the awful heat resulting. As you look
at night from the wide verandas of the Boa Vista hotel,
you notice lights like fireflies flitting along the Praya
Grande. They are the lanterns of the few who must be
abroad late, or of adventurers who are returning from
the fan-tan gambling-houses. The lukongs will challenge
none who bears a light. In all oriental cities there are
more private watchmen than police.

The hospitality of the Macaense is proverbial. Their
table conspicuously displays the influence the Chinese
have had upon them during four centuries: candy fla-
vored with arbutus and haw seeds ; laoping pasties made
of water chestnuts and flour and colored the popular
citron yellow; coagulated duck's blood pudding; bamboo
shoots preserved in sugar; and carambola and mango
jellies. As butter is scarce, you can taste the sesamum
oil in food.

A visit to the opium farm, as you drive up the tortu-
ous Rua da Penha, affords a curiosity. The lane which
runs along the low, dreary factory smells of the narcotic
fumes, and not a green blade grows. Look through the
bars. They are boiling, stirring and straining the balls

78 THE CHINESE

from India, which they have mixed with the lower grade
pods from their own Yunnan fields, in brass dishes, till
finished like brown treacle the mixture is poured into
water-buffalo horn cups. These cups are incased in tin,
and again in camphor-wood. There is a great park-like,
stone-paved court attached to the factory, but none save
an Occidental is ever seen in it. The factory boys are
more stupefied for sleep than play, after their work. All
the opium brought to America is made at this farm.
The ships lie twenty miles away, just off the edge of the
smuggling shallows, at the famous Kowhow-Yang an-
chorage, where arms are dealt in at night over the sides
of phantom ships, for pirates and the Young China party.
Old-fashioned Portuguese gunboats, like the Diu and
Goa, with low waists and high bulwarks, and Arm-
strong guns on wooden carriages lashed to the deck,
escort the prize-laden, high-sterned junks from the
crowded inner anchorage to the mail steamers. I once
returned on the gunboat with the tanned Legionaires
of the romantic little kingdom. The men could recite
the epic of Camoens with that pathos which is possible
only by those who have a proud past, but no possible
future. The shippers of the opium are quite justified in
their fears that pirates may dash out for the million-dollar
cargo from behind Taipa, Don Joao or Lapa Islands.

Lonely Portugal, the relict of a great race, sits in her
ancient palace surrounded by portraits of a famous past.
The names she whispers in her melancholy are Da Gama,
who gave the world the sea-link to India; Prince Henry
the navigator, who suggested to Columbus his ambitions ;
and Camoens, who was the Chaucer of the Portuguese
language, and one of literature's five great epic writers.
He was the greatest genius of Portugal, versed in the

4-

Oldest ruin (1594 A.D.) of European association in China, facade

of San Paulo Cathedral, Macao. The Chinese classic,

" Ming Shi.'' lauds the architecture. Quaint bronze

statues were cast at Bocarro's gun foundry

at Macao in i6th century.

Macao, looking from Penha Height to Cape Sao Francisco. Famous

Praya Grande drive facing water; Guia lighthouse in right

distance, and Monte Fort in left distance, both

first of their kind in China.

Macao, looking from Cape Sao Francisco to Penha Heights.
Hotel " Boa Vista " in distance.

THE PORTUGUESE AND CAMOENS 79

classics like Milton, a warrior of Sydney's stamp, a
dashing courtier, and a traveler of Cervantes' wit.
Portugal may be notable again, when Brazil, her off-
spring by blood and literature, dominates in South
America. She exists to-day as a tragically discontented
decadence in Europe; a sunny spot in China; a group
of forsaken cathedrals on the Malabar Coast, and a neg-
lected blur of uninhabited territory under the blue-
and-white flag-of-the-castles, in Africa.

Half-way between Hong-Kong and Canton, on a nar-
row peninsula of canal-veined Heang-Shan district of
Kwangtung Province, between the Pearl River and the
sea, is the settlement of Macao, holding in its arms, to-
ward the cool sou-west monsoon a flashing blue bay,
which dashes its waters over the long walls of the circling
Praya Grande. It is the Naples of the Orient in appear-
ance, color, joy and carelessness. Here in 1557 came
Camoens, a political exile, and here he wrote half of The
Lusiad, thus producing in China a supreme work of
European literature, in days when the American hemi-
sphere loomed like cliffs of wonder in the uncertain mists
of early discovery, and when the morning star of Shakes-
peare had not yet risen on the minds of mankind.
Camoens' luxuriant garden and grotto overlook the
inner and outer harbors, which were covered in his day,
as on the golden afternoon when I saw them first, with a
forest of yellow and brown matting sails of junks. Little,
however, was the poet's heart fed by the argosies of
silver, golden brocades, ivory, pearls, porcelain, camphor,
and silk, passing homeward to his cruel Lisbon. He was
weaving another web, and his heart, bitter in exile, was
wounded to produce the poetic pearls of a second
Odyssey.

8o THE CHINESE

Blue, yellow, red and brown, the squat buildings of
Macao crowd on rising, uneven ground, and present, with
their roofs of heavy tiles, a color scheme worthy of the
brush of Velasquez. The streets run a zigzag course,
so that from house to house defense could be made
against the Chinese, or against the Dutch in the later
"days of the Colony. These houses are popular with the
Chinese, whose superstition it is that a devil can not turn
a corner. The shutters of the buildings have fish-scale
and pearl-shell windows, which soften in the rooms the
intense light of an oriental day. High against the sky-
line is the distinguishing ruin of Macao, the windowless
Renaissance fagade of the burned San Paulo Cathedral,
with its three rows of Corinthian pillars, superimposed
on ten Ionic pillars. The antique edifice was erected early
in the sixteenth century. The magnificent flight of one
hundred stone steps, as wide as the edifice itself, is bound
by Time's hand in plumes of grass and bright oriental
blooms, and the night alone swings lamps of worship
over the old roofless altar of four centuries ago. In the
Se Cathedral I heard a military mass, reminiscent of the
cavalcades of Da Gama and Cortez, the host being sa-
luted with presented swords. The Miserere of Gounod
was played by a military brass band in the church loft.
Little swarthy soldiers, uniformed in blue, swung along
the dazzling streets to a march played by the bugle.
They wore rimless caps, these reckless ones, suited more
for the Estrella Mountains of their homeland than the
pitiless suns of the East, but with the impulsive Latins,
as with the Chinese, appearance and old customs must
never be sacrificed for a mere thing like climate.

The government ration to the soldiers included good
Colares wine, poured desecratingly from a tin pail into

JHE PORTUGUESE AND CAMOENS Si

pewter cups. The native-born Portuguese, called Maca-
ense, dress in contradistinction to the usual oriental cus-
tom, in black, which uncomfortably attracts the actinic
rays of the sun. The small ruling class from Lisbon
seems out of place in the exotic gowns of European
fashion. The Chinese shuffle along the excellent concrete
military roads in their gorgeous blouses of purple, yel-
low and blue, and they look to the manor born. They
gather in knots before the wax-model and lantern stores on
bright Rua Felicidade, and discuss progress in the ear of
the unprogressive. The blue-and-white barred turbans, with
long streamers attached, of the imported Sikh police make
the most attractive head-gear one could see the world
over. The sound of clanking chains approaches along
the road, and a band of native prisoners, linked together,
who have been working on the highway, are escorted by.
Filled with the piety of Xavier, and following his steps
on the same sunny roads, the little Colony is most charac-
teristically solemn and impressive in its Santa Croce
procession in June, which reminds one of the Paso pro-
cessions of Seville. The Legionaires are as disciplinary
as the soldiers of Da Gama; they compel the Protestant
stranger at the points of their swords to remove his hat.
The music is doleful and fitful sobs fill its pauses. The
procession is slow and halting; its color is black where
the small number of Europeans and Macaense lead, and
purple where the long line of Chinese converts follow.
Down the Rua da Se, named from the yellow, Spanish-
style cathedral at its head, it winds to the Praya Grande
which skirts the ocean. Camellias, carnations and leaves
are scattered at the nine street stations of the Cross.
Two children robed in white, and winged as Raphaelic
cherubs, lead and regulate the kneeling and the march.

82 THE CHINESE

The whole Colony is out upon the harbor street; the
women veiled behind their Do cloths are in the windows
of the single line of houses which face the bay; the rest
of the city is deserted. The Chinese come to wonder
especially at the gaily dressed band of converts who are
nearly all girl slaves who were purchased in childhood.
The Casa Misericordia, the Church Lottery, is strongly
represented by liveried officials. Finally a heroic-sized
figure of Christ, bearing His cross, is brought forward
upon the shoulders of the troops. The flare of the
trumpets assails the heathen air; the draped drums roll
out the gathering thunder; the emotion of the onlookers
contributes sobs, and the little band of Catholic exiles
take every thrill of courage possible out of their famous
fete. High above the Areia Preta Beach, behind the
square walls of the Protestant cemetery which is smoth-
ered in a vast foliage, lies the body of Robert Morrison,
the pioneer Protestant missionary and translator, whose
name is at last coming into its own in a great fame, now
that the Christian scriptures are leavening China.

On the fifth day of the fifth moon, the Chinese hold
their religious procession of Ken Yuen, their greatest
democrat whom they have canonized, which ceremony,
however, takes place on the water, and the Macaense be-
come the spectators. Flimsy bamboo stands, bound to-
gether with rattan only, are erected, and their not
infrequent precipitation in the excitement causes vast loss
of life. The island communities of Taipa, Joao, Lapa
and Heungshan send boats, very like our war canoes,
only that the bow and stern are carved into the form of
a dragon. The ceremony includes the casting of gifts
and sacrifices into the water, which was copied by the
Venetian doges when they heard the tales which Marco

THE PORTUGUESE AND CAMOENS 83

Polo brought home. The festival closes with racing on
a vast scale. The boats are all overmanned, sometimes
with sixty paddlers, and the gunwales are often only five
inches above the choppy water. A platform is raised in
the waist, on which stands a naked man who beats the
stroke on a gong for his bareback crew. Native women
are, of course, kept at home. In the exciting finish I
have seen the stroke raised to seventy-five. The irregu-
larity of the paddling as much as the collisions is respon-
sible for the swampings. The whole world has leaped
in alarm when telegrams have come from Yuet Shing on
the Kau Kwan reach of the West River, of the loss of one
thousand lives through the tumbling of one of the stands
during the wild finish of the races there. After the
races, the boats paddle to all the villages of the sea
delta. Wafted into your room on the Penha Height at
Macao by the sou-west monsoon, far into the night, like
the classic echoes of the strokes of Jason's crew, come the
sounds of the gongs and the paddles of these dusky boat-
men as they visit and challenge for the morrow among
the bays of Taipa and Joao.

Once a month, on a Sunday, crowds from Hong-Kong
repair to Macao, to a classic little building with white
barred windows, on the Rua da Se, to witness the draw-
ings of the Misericordia Lottery, which is the most ex-
tensive in the East and has given Macao the name of the
oriental Monte Carlo. The officers are in uniform and
have just come from special benediction for the drawing,
and mass in the Se Cathedral close by. Inside a railing
the costumed committee sit, with a smile upon their
countenances, which is half between the cupidity of a
gambler and the satisfaction of a virtuous judge. A
trumpet is blown for eclat. Around goes the great brass

84 THE CHINESE

globe, while every breath is held. The dice-like number,
which falls out only one at a time, is passed to three per-
sons, two of whom witness the number, and the last steps
forward and theatrically announces it to the assemblage
beyond the rails. This lottery draws from Manila three
hundred thousand pesos annually; from Hong-Kong six
hundred thousand dollars, Mexican. For its franchise it
is compelled to maintain Macaense charities, including a
college named for St. Joseph, under the direction of the
church; hence the religious name of the lottery. It also
pays a heavy tax to the " Governmento Leal," half of which
assists to maintain the fine local roads; a quarter goes
home to Portugal to be lost in the aristocratic halls of
the white Ajuda palace on the cliffs of Belem; and a
quarter helps to support the poorer Portuguese colony of
Timor near Sumatra. In comparison with this lottery
the largest bank of Macao, the Po Hang, hides its dimin-
ished head.

In the arch of the half moon bay at Macao, between
the forts of Bomparto and Francisco, just before you
turn up the street by the park where the Portuguese bands
play on Sunday afternoons, you will notice an unusual
house for the East. It faces the purple bay where the
fishing junks are drying their brown nets on yellow main-
sails. The windows are of imported stained glass, and
the grilles are painted white. It is the only house you
have ever seen in China where the blue stucco is not
scaling or lichening like an architectural leper. You are
told the owner is a rich Chinese, or a Tsai-shu, and that
his country place is among the Heungshan Hills where
he was born in poverty, ten miles away on execrable
roads, which pass through acres of graves, underneath
wonderful tamarind trees, and past the golf course of

THE PORTUGUESE AND CAMOENS 85

the navy and outdoor staff of the Imperial Customs Serv-
ice, where the holes are earthen cups hammered into the
stony hillside. I took a 'rickisha, with two pushmen and
made the trip, which is one of as many ups and downs as
a Gulf Stream passage when the wind is against the tide.
It would have been better to have taken a barrow, espe-
cially between Passaleao and Chinsan. At the Porta da
Cerco, where the soldiers are drinking imported Colares
wine, and lolling under the trees, you leave Portuguese
territory, and enter old China. The truck gardens smell
noisome, but are luxuriant in appearance. The chow
dogs are barking like a side-battery. The tillers never
leave their fields to look at you, a Fung Kwei, and the
coolie, though weighted with two heavy pails hanging
from a bamboo borne upon his bare shoulders, steps off
the road into the swamp to let you pass, but he does not
look up. The manners of China, by the Tao Li code, are
self-effasive. At the outskirts of a village, you come to
the country seat. Hand-cut granite walls inclose a lawn
where horned black water-buffalo feed. The tea-house
at the gate is open for you to step in and rest. You pass
through doors which are always open, to the rock garden,
the lily pools, the fir forest, and the flat gardens of clipped
chrysanthemums nearer the house. Cool stone seats are
everywhere, roofed over to hold off the great sun. The
master sends you tea, even though you have not sent in
your card, you being only a hurried foreign visitor of no
significance, who has heard that his grounds are open
to every one. In our land the seat would cost a million.
There is not an establishment in the village worth twenty
dollars, but the religion of China requires that a man shall
return to his birthplace. The remarkable man whose
homes these were, died at the Praya Grande house in

86 THE CHINESE

September, 1906. His name was Ah Fong, and he had
been living in retirement for fifteen years with his homely
village relatives. Forty years previous he emigrated to
Honolulu, where he amassed millions in sugar and labor
contracting. He married there a half white and half
Kanaka woman, by whom he had thirteen daughters and
two sons. When he left Honolulu he gave his wife and
daughters, who did not want to go to China, one million
dollars. One of the daughters married an admiral in
the United States navy, and the others made marriages
with white men of some prominence in the territory. Ah
Fong brought his son Anthony to China, and to him he
has left the greater part of this romantic fortune on the
stipulation that he shall follow the religion and patriotic
teachings of Confucius. China has had no emigrant
whose career has been more picturesque ; she has had no
son who was more loyal ; at home among his people they
merely tell you that he did his duty to his forefathers and
his country, and that he will therefore never lack a male
heir to bow before his tablet.

The doorways and gateways are a mine for the illus-
trator, in their quaint lines of stucco. Through many
a gate of ancient wrought iron work glimpses were had
of luxuriant tropical gardens, hid behind high white-
washed chunam walls, which glistened like a porcupine
with their armor of green, broken Munchen bottles stuck
in the plaster. From ten A. M. until four p. M. the almost
breezeless, burning streets are deserted. In the silent
night the native watchman drags his wooden sandals
noisily along and strikes his drum as he goes his rounds,
so that thieves and evil spirits may know his whereabouts,
and work elsewhere.
, When England, in the days of Henry VIII. was war-

THE PORTUGUESE AND CAMOENS 87

ring no farther away from home than France, Macao,
at the end of the earth, was strenuous in daring struggles.
The Dutch attacked St. Francis Fort, but drew off their
battered boats in defeat. The old copper cannon still
glisten on the picturesque ramparts, and beneath the white
stucco sentry boxes. At the Monte Fort they cast can-
non, and when war of; their own was not on, turned a
penny by selling the armament (the institution of manu-
factures in China), as in 1651, to the king of Cochin
China. In 1622, two hundred Spanish infantry, and
some cannon arrived from Manila to help the Macaense
against the Dutch. In Macao of to-day, opium is taxed
and gambling farmed, to feed the depleted purse of a
decaying Portugal. Macao was the emporium of South-
ern China until 1840, when she was superseded by British
Hong-Kong, which lies forty miles eastward, and that
the feeling of resentment toward the British still rankles
in the Macaense breast on this account, is evidenced by
Montalto de Jesus' history of Macao, published as late
as 1902, when every one supposed that the remembrance
of the slave barracoons and opium had been lost long ago.
In this old city of China, once lived and wrote the
illustrious poet whose name reads like a jewel, and is
sounded with the rich vowels of Greece. Camoens was
over forty when he completed his epic. He died in
Portugal, alas a victim of the Black Death, which, in its
own melancholy haunts, he had defied a thousand times.
The bubonic plague which was then attacking Europe,
originated in the territory of Camoens' exile. It exists
there to-day, and is the terror which arises every May
in Hong-Kong and Canton, alarming the ships that ply
therefrom to every European port. In Camoens' time
the plague went overland from mephitic Yunnan to Bur-

88 THE CHINESE

mah, following the Moorish traders from China to India,
and the Red Sea, and by Arabic caravan to Constanti-
nople and Venice. To trace its dire sweep through
Milan and London, we need only read the terror-stricken
pages of Manzoni and Pepys. Camoens, like Cervantes,
in the fashion of the time, was soldier before being poet.
He was a Hermes in regular features and curly yellow
hair. In those days statesmen were poets first and
courtiers afterward. Such were the talented and gal-
lant Sortelha and Conde de Vimiosa. The Infanta,
Donna Maria, led her court in epigram and sonnet.
Portugal in the days of Camoens was a forerunner of
what England was to become in the time of Raleigh.
Arms, adventure and literature danced the measure, and
the actor played equally well all three roles. For a while
Camoens was the favorite of the Lisbon Court, until that
unfortunate day when his admiring eyes fell on the
golden-tressed Donna Caterina, kneeling at prayer in the
Church of the Chagos. Then his woes began, but with
his woes upgrew his character, his interest in mankind of
all colors and religions, and his fame. The Donna Cate-
rina was of the queen's household, and the court op-
posed a suit, which was beyond his station. But this
temerity also was the fashion of the time, for poor Tasso
had similarly loved at Ferrara.

Camoens was born in 1524 at Lisbon. The world had
almost forgotten classicism. The Renaissance and Boc-
caccio were long asleep. Chaucer had died in England,
and all seemed dark again. It was yet a long cry to the
births of Shakespeare and Milton. The Renaissance had
sown the seed of ideals, but the seed was slumbering. In
Camoens' time, Portugal was to rise, thrilled with the
new life, and her glory it was to give India, South

THE PORTUGUESE AND CAMOENS 89

America, Asia, and the seas of all the globe to the vision
and touch of marveling men. It was a generation of
gods, but as ever the gods whom men make have feet
of clay. Greece's clay was State's rights politics;
Portugal's was ill-distributed wealth. Camoens' fate
drifted into a current that bore him far from his sun, the
Donna Caterina, and a rival Andrade de Caminha, who
could also touch the lyre, but dressed in a more fashion-
able livery, displaced him. Banished by captious royalty
from the court, Camoens fought under his country's
flag in Africa with no diminution of patriotism, which
showed the man he was, because in those days there was
no democratic sentiment to laugh with those whom soci-
ety snubs. In leading a boarding party over the bul-
warks of a Moorish galley off Ceuta, he lost his right
eye. With the dauntless spirit of the traveler, but with
the broken heart of a lover, at twilight on a day in March,
1553, aboard the San Bento, he put out once more from
the golden Tagus. He was then twenty-nine years of
age. In nine months he was in Goa, on the Malabar
coast of India, and it was here on his way home with his
immortal poem, The Lusiad, seventeen years later,
that he was to hear of the death of the inspirer of hisf
youth, the Donna Caterina. Life for a' while was ad- i
venture only. The feats of arms were considerable,
sometimes two thousand being slain. In winter there
were Moors to pursue at Ormuz, and through the summer
heat, in dissipated days for most of his companions, they
dreamed at Goa. Owing to a satire of Camoens, who
was engaged in more intellectual if not more tactful work
than wine-bibbing, Governor Barreto banished him from
Goa to the little colony of Macao in China.

When the discouraged poet first saw. Macao from the

90 THE CHINESE

sea he wrote : " In this lonely, sterile, sun-scorched land
did fortune will that my life be passed, and in fragments
be scattered throughout the world." Here he finally
found the cords of life pulling taut, and the breeze sure
and full, with a course laid which he might sail, unpur-
sued of enemies. He had a luxuriant garden; a small
competence as " Trustee of the Estates of Those at
Home," for the faint-hearted soon left if they might ; and
a devoted Javanese slave. The angel of fame, as present
in the ends of the earth as in the temple of Delphi, gave
him a language to seal to a people, and an epic whose
theme is the widest man has sung. In the yellow matting
junk sails of the Pearl he dreamed that he beheld the
argosies of classic song, and the gong of the Confucian
rang in his fancy as the cymbal of Bacchus. Without the
accommodating temper of the soldier, the poet's imagina-
tion in him would have sunk in despair. Courage held
him up in his lonely life. Poesy was the bread of his
soul. His theme was his nation, and patriotism was held
by him almost in a frenzy. His was that refined patri-
otism which sees one's country, not as she is or has
treated him, but as she would be when he had in love re-
molded her.

I have seen the proud Macaense gathered about the
poet's bust at the famous grotto at Macao, while an ora-
tor, tearful with emotion, recited the proud cadences of
the great song of his dying race. Camoens was the
Homer of the Portuguese, and Da Gama and Albuquerque
were his Ulysses and Eurylochus. Almost within his
lifetime, Portugal was the shore that abutted on the sea
of oblivion. Within his memory, the African coast had
been ventured along, Good Hope rounded, Azores found,
Brazil discovered by accident, India linked by a sea route,

.

Macao, the Inner Praya. Curious house with bamboo roof garden,

oyster-shell windows, brick, tile, and stucco work;

architecture showing Portuguese influence

of the past five centuries.

COPVHIOHT. »v UNDERWOOD 4 UNDERWOOD, N. 1

The beautiful marble and teak Royal Palace, Peking, where the

Emperor Kwang Su and Dowager Empress died in November,

1908. The grotesque lions attract sculptors from the whole world.

Shanghai, the metropolis of East Central China, looking south into

the French and native quarters. Shanghai, situated at the

junction of Soochow Creek and Huang Phu river, is 16

miles inland from the mouth of the Yang-tze river.

THE PORTUGUESE AND CAMOENS 91

and Lisbon displaced Venice as the capital of the world
and the hub of luxury and fashion. The " celibate of
Sagre," Prince Henry the Navigator, in his court at
Cape St. Vincent, was the brother of these greatest of
discoverers, this " Company of Captains." Vessels were
then half-decked, and carried thirty-six sailors. It was
with four of these caravels that Da Gama took a year to
reach India. Not only to the south went the intrepid
Portuguese, for Martin Lopez discovered Nova Zembla
on a search northeast for Cathay. Evora's caravans
ventured the dreariest, hottest and widest desert of the
earth, then called Guebla, as far as Timbuctoo. Andrade
reached fabled Peking in 1521. Magellan, bowing under
the auspicious sign of the Southern Cross, parted the
violet veil that concealed the Pacific, and Pinto landed in
quaint Japan in 1537. Little Portugal is the grand-
mother of the world. In every glass of her famous wine,
that breathes the richest boquet at our dinners, she
should be toasted by the nations on whom she has be-
stowed her heritage of discovery. The vast, world-
encircling commerce of modern times was founded by
Portugal in the fifteenth century. Some day a baron of
British, American or Japanese shipping, who has a taste
for history, may desire to perpetuate gratitude by erecting
at Sagre, in old Portugal, a monument to Prince Henry
the Navigator. In St. Francis Xavier, who came to Goa
in 1542, Portugal instituted world missions. In the
noble De Castro, invincible in battle and pure in life,
she has given a hero to song and story. From the Moors
and Venetians in the Red Sea and India, this soldier won
dominion for the Portuguese, and died in the arms of
Xavier, bequeathing to his son " his only spoils and
riches, a sword unrivaled and spotless of shame."

92 THE CHINESE

These are the antecedents of Camoens and the heroes
of his epic Os Lusiadas, which was published in
Lisbon in 1572. The French Montesquieu wrote: " It
makes us feel something of the charms of the Odyssey
and the magnificence of the JEneid." The English Hal-
lam called it " the first successful attempt in Europe to
construct an epic poem on the ancient model; it is the
mirror of a heart full of love, courage, generosity and
patriotism." Doctor Johnson contemplated the transla-
tion of the poem, but afterward invited Goldsmith, with
his larger sympathy and understanding of travel, to do the
work. Voltaire called Camoens the " Milton of the
Portuguese." The first translation in English of The
Lusiad was made by Richard Fanshaw, a literary diplo-
mat of Charles II. 's reign. It has been translated into
English by Aubertin, Sir Richard Burton, and Thomas
Musgrave. Mickle's translation, made in 1776, is prob-
ably the best known. The stately iambics of that transla-
tion do not do justice to the sprightly dactyls and silvery
rhyme of the original. The metaphors are luxuriant, as
about our classic forms the poet twined the colored vines
of oriental fancy. Camoens had been first a lyrist. The
purity of form of the Italian sonnet had influenced him.
He was profoundly educated at the University of Coim-
bra, then at the height of its renown, in the Greek and
Latin poets. In The Lusiad, he broke from the severe
classical style of his compatriot Ribeiro and the Italian in-
fluence of Miranda, which looked to the past only, and
founded a virile Portuguese language, which adopted the
best of what was new and strong in the experience of the
traveled, of whom he was the chief. His poem is the
bond of the Portuguese at home, in wide Brazil, Goa, Mo-
zambique, Macao, and Hong-Kong. Virgil was his mas-

THE PORTUGUESE AND CAMOENS 93

ter in elaborating a theme. Voltaire pointed out that a
serious fault of the poem is in the commingling of Chris-
tian and classic imagery. In Camoens' epic there
breathes a similar religious purpose to that which con-
sumed Milton. Milton exalted his story to the heavens.
Camoens chose a theme all human, which trailed its in-
domitable course over the most dangerous paths of the
world in the half-awakened morning of the newly dis-
covered planet.

This is the theme of The Lusiad; the history of Portu-
gal at the acme of her glory, and the spirit and past of
ancient Macao, where the conception of it all was nursed,
and where it was brought to bloom. It is the greatest
epic of travel; the history of the feud between Moorish
caravan and Portuguese caravel for the first sandal-
scented oriental commerce. The arena spreads from the
arid plains of Arabia to the dancing purple waters of
India. The rounding of the Cape of Storms (Good
Hope) with the frail vessels of that age has probably
been the most awesome adventure in the imagination of
mortals. India by overland route had been reached;
South America had been discovered; the Atlantic was
ferried ; but the demons of the lost were believed to have
placed an insurmountable barrier, reaching into the tur-
bulent unknown, between India and Europe. When the
Portuguese captains first set sail, Europe was mist-
wrapped and demon-haunted off shore, like Turner's
painting, Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, only here and
there a galleon, after the blessing of the waters and unc-
tion for the sailors, braving a narrow sea; Venice ven-
turing along the Mediterranean shore ; Flanders assailing
the Baltic, and England smiting the channel with her
Viking prows. From the dark Moors, who, it was

94 THE CHINESE

rumored, had sent out adventurers on waters mysterious,
Prhice Henry the Navigator learned that Africa prob-
ably extended to the equator. Henry's first salvage
from the deeps was Madeira, and upon that success he
sent out captain after captain, like one possessed of a uni-
versal vision. Probably the most ecstatic thrill of the
human imagination has been accorded to this famous
prince who was as scientific as he was enthusiastic,
though history has not so credited him.

The Liisiad's hero is Vasco Da Gama, and its story,
his adventures from Lisbon to Calicut in India, during
the two years and two months which it took him to make
the voyage. The Moslems were masters of the Eastern
waters and Calicut was their emporium. The first canto of
the epic is fresh with new pictures of the new-found far
East : " The sails they hoisted were of matting made,
woven of leaves of palm trees." Canto Three contains
the famous romance of Ignez de Castro, which secured
Voltaire's enthusiasm, and is one of the most celebrated
in all literature. The gentle Ignez was maid of honor
to the Infanta, and was clandestinely married to the
heir, Don Pedro. When this was discovered by the
ambitious and cruel King Alphonso, he ordered Ignez
to be murdered. When Pedro succeeded to the king-
dom, he ordered his bride's remains to be disinterred
and placed on the throne, and the homage of the people
done to her, as a saint who was queen even in death.
The figures of the story are woven with the luxuriousness
of Keats:

Estavas Undo Ignez, posta em socego;
Mas ella os olhos, comque o ar serena."
" Behold her, fair Ignez, deep-bosomed in quiet ;
Soft-turning her eyes, e'en the cruel air she calmeth."

THE PORTUGUESE AND CAMOENS 95

Adventure, classic allusion and romance, succeed one
another in limpid and alluring verse, and strength is not
lacking, as witness the stupendous battle masterpiece in
describing Aljubarota. Voltaire, cynical concerning the
poem as a whole because he hated the joys of the
imagination not less than the confident truths of ex-
perience, was carried away despite himself with the vision
of Adamastor in Canto Five. The pictures of storms
have the true sweep of typhonic nature, from the experi-
ence of fearful months of privation and danger by the
poet himself on the yellow Chinese seas, in days when
ships were merely shells. It is interesting to know what
the Lusitanian thought of his less cultured neighbors.
He calls the Teutons " all pride, rebels to creed," and the
English through whose taciturnity few Latins have ever
penetrated to discover any real idealism or vivacious en-
joyment of achievement, he called : " hard, in Hyper-
borean winters walled." Canto Nine contains the be-
witching allegory of the Isles of Love, which Venus
brings from the sea. Here Camoens has shed the adorn-
ing fancies of the Orient on the forms of Greece, and
every line revels in coruscating color. Thus through
strange lands and beautiful story does he bring the Lu-
sians back to Lisbon, and lays his poem at the feet of the
nation. He is buried in the Franciscan Church of Santa
Anna at Lisbon, and upon his tomb are the lachrymal
words where Fame charges Life with treachery : " He
excelled all the poets of his time; he lived poor and
miserable, and he died so."

The poet's fame is more beautifully kept at Macao. In
the grotto of his exile, the world's poets, among them the
exquisite English hymn-writer, Governor Sir John Bow-
ring of near-by Hong-Kong, have carved in the enduring

96 THE CHINESE

granite of the Chinese hills, their gentle lines of praise
about the poet's bust in honor of their pilgrimage, which
is the only one in the Orient of European literary associ-
ation. The banyan, the tamarind and bamboo keep shade
in the poet's garden. The tuberoses, camellias and
azaleas make the air dense as with censers. Still does
the Chukiang (Pearl) roll beneath his seat and whisper
the old lullabies. The yellow matting sails still drift
with the returning tides, as in the evenings long ago,
when they were borne slowly from the poet's vision into
the wide oriental sunset of cloudless gold. Soft oars
beat by in the dusk, as though the poet's spirit passed
along. A silver gong from a belated junk strikes the
first stars into being, as once before in a land where there
is no twilight, they showered from the fingers of a
Southern Night, to teach their music of the soul to a
lost one at last attuned to their purposes, the exile Louis
de Camoens.

Ill

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE AMONG THE CHINESE

Lives there a land which has no political parties ? Then
look there for the secret society in all its rank luxuri-
ance;. China abounds in it. Socially its curse is that it
upholds its members in private evil more than in the public
good at which its charter loftily aims, and from the exer-
cise of which it is prevented by the present stunted consti-
tution of the country. At Tientsin there is a house
known to foreigners from its door as the " Society of the
Red Door." To the initiated it is the " Society which
Meets Injury with Retaliation." The branch at Hang-
chow, known as Hung Pang, or Red Association, is
constantly fomenting rice riots between the villagers and
the up-country boatmen who arrive from the Grand
Canal, as a pretext for political risings. Only recently
they captured a prefectural city and it was necessary to
call upon the reorganized Imperial troops to dislodge
them. In Che-kiang Province the Chiu Sik Lun (Earthen
Pot Society) murdered a governor in August, 1907, for
discouraging the principles of the New China party,
and the effect has eddied at last as far as Peking, in the
institution of the new Supreme Council, whose duties are
proclaimed to be the educating of the country toward
representative government. The echoes of the fourth
century rescripts of Honorius, or the nearer melancholy
of the Chinese edicts of 1898! Unless China does more
for real representation, dissolution is not staved off for

97

98 THE CHINESE

ever, any more than it was during the lingering centuries
of the Roman Empire. Advance and a partial reaction
divide history, and China has had her share of the latter
during the Manchu tenancy of the throne. The most
famous secret society is the Triad (Sam Hop Wui), the
members of which are supposed to go armed for private
revenge, in addition to the great aim of their body to
enthrone a native dynasty. They are ruled by a Master
of the Red Stick, who sets the penalties. The " Society
of the Sword " is also anti-dynastic, and strong in the
central provinces for the new patriotism. During the
New Year celebration of two weeks, all secret societies,
as well as the guilds, whose rivalry also is often very
bitter, declare a " Truce of the Gods," when no man may
attack his brother. This is generally respected. Both
the hunter and the hunted are glad of a relief, when they
may feel free to travel, or be careless in the use of their
samschu wine.

The statute books contain the unrepealed death penalty
for belonging to some of the secret societies, such as the
Gee Kung Tong, which also is a Freemasonry vowed to
the work of driving from the throne the Manchu house
of Tsings and establishing thereon descendants of the
Mings, but the government does not dare to enforce the
statute. They would have to depopulate the kingdom
if they did. The Ko Lo Win is a similar anti-
dynastic society. The branch of the society among the
emigrants in Malaysia is called the Orchids, and lines
of their poetry are breezy enough to dispel the ennui of.
exiles. " We are strong and spread everywhere, com-
mand hills and rivers; despise us who dare. Lo! In
Fu-kien, a black flag flying; Attention! Kun Su is the
place for gathering."

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 99

Candidates are sometimes rushed for election by being
kidnapped in bags and brought to the lodge room.
Meetings are called by split bamboos being left at the
residences of the members. Since 1845 in Hong-Kong,
and a later date in Singapore, the British government
has prohibited meetings of the Triad Society. Where
murders are committed, the sentence of death is passed
upon the local leaders, whether they are present or
not. In a trial at Sarawak, Straits Settlements, under
British law, in April, 1906, a jury composed of eight
Chinese towkays, three Malays and one European (fore-
man) passed sentence of death upon eight leaders for
the murder of one victim of the Triads.

The Buddhists have a temperance society called the
Tsai Li, which has effectively adopted the anti-opium
crusade, and its enthusiasm is stimulated by certain
secret society rules, which are so dear to the Chinese
heart. In the same way religiously, Buddhism got her
roots safely in Chinese ground by adopting ancestor
worship. The Oriental distrusts iconoclasts.

That a hidden tide is undermining educational China
is most marked in the discontinuance, in their old form,
of the triennial classical examinations which have been
in vogue thirteen hundred years, and whose three degrees
of Hsiuts' ai (Budding Talent) answering to our B.A. ;
Chujen (M.A.), and Chin Shih (D.C.L.) for which a
yellow diploma with red characters was issued, — alone
opened the way to political employment, which is con-
sidered the highest profession in the land. Nien shu
tso kuan: " Get education and position will get you."
Examination for the higher degrees included ree'xam-
ination in considerable of the lower. No such feats of
memory have ever been required of students, and where

ioo THE CHINESE

this faculty alone is required, the oriental student is
invincible in American colleges. Where our students
speak of " ponies " and " cribs," the oriental student
jokes about his " skin paper," but so cumbersome is the
language that a crib, to be of any use, would be de-
tectable. A red sash is worn from the right shoulder
to the left waist. During the examination, the student
in his cell recalls that at home, and in the pagoda, his
family have hung lamps before the idol as votives on
his behalf. Even though the successful scholar enters
business he is considered of the Shin Kin, or gentry of
his district, there being no landed titles. A branch of
the olive is waved over the winner's head, and frequently
he is hazed and " run " for secret societies. Like the
Campanile of St. Mark's, without immediate warning,
this famous institution has tumbled in Kwangtung and
is being reerected with the Tsin Tsueh or new learning
taking the place of one third of the old. The first blow
at the old system was really struck by the lately deceased
emperor, Kwang Su, in his famous reformatory edicts
of 1898, when he was disturbed by the shocks of and the
reasons for his defeat by Japan. Every village is now
striving to possess a Hok Tong (day school) which
will conform with the new standards of the Board of
Education, whose requirements include military drill.
The most radical decrees in the history of the throne,
those of Kwong Su in 1897, were addressed to man-
darins and " schoolmasters." The new text books use
illustration to the fullest advantages. These books, as
well as the maps and globes, are at present all prepared
in Japan. Many Japanese teachers are employed, and
numbers of them as professors in English. Education
and property will equally be the qualification for suffrage

A merry market party floating down a tidal river in South China.

A fine view of river life, Canton, South China ; temple with gable
carvings in foreground ; three pawnshop towers in distance.

North Wall of Canton and " Five-story Pagoda." Note in fore-
ground marble graves of two native rich men,
set in bare hillside.

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 101

in electing the proposed provincial parliaments, which
are suggested for trial two years hence by the Kiun Ki
Chu, or new Supreme Council.

In 1905 China sent ten thousand pupils to Japan, in
1906 she doubled the number, which has been increasing
right along. When America in 1908 waived rights to
half of her share of the Boxer indemnity of 1900,
China enthusiastically reciprocated by recruiting scholars
to go to America's colleges and schools. The future
will show that this move was one of unusual brilliance
on America's part. Hong-Kong for some time has
possessed a medical school for Chinese, and Singa-
pore, through the generosity of the towkays, has af-
forded similar opportunities to natives. Canton is soon
to have bestowed upon it a medical college under the
auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, which with
the branch of Yale College called " Elegant Proprieties "
at Changsha, Hunan's capital, have here the opportunity
to seize an influence and do a work with the more in-
telligent natives, which missionary societies have failed
in because of the suspicion attending purely religious
auspices at the present time. Prophetically, the first
patent issued by China was granted to a Nankinese for
an electric light, which of course adopted a poetic
name, " the new moonshine." As you enter the palace
at Peking, the new and the old display themselves in
an unusual fraternization. The lacquered teak bars have
been displaced by plate glass doors, on which the word
" Sho " (long life) has been emblazoned in immense
red characters. In the new schools in Kwangtung
the provincial government is offering the high salary of
thirty dollars Mexican (fifteen dollars gold) a month to
native teachers. Those who have had experience in mis-

102 THE CHINESE

sion schools are preferred, for this province remembers
that other wonderful mission school pupil, the famous
Hung Siu Tsuen who nearly reached the oldest and wid-
est throne of the ages. It is to be hoped that the sacred
Kings, and the Confucian collection of prose and verse,
will always retain the place in the culture of the na-
tion that is held by Greek literature in western refine-
ment. Chinese travelers say : " When you seek culture
go to Canton; when you seek its opposite, go to Fu-
chau."

The proudest procession of the clan is the mar-
riage procession, and in it the highest of all the banners
are those naming the men who have won literary degrees.
A graduate erects a flagpole before his home, and his
proud father nails on it a triangle. The ten thousand
stalls in dreary rows at Wuchang across the river from
Han-kau, the seventeen thousand brick booths in the
western capital, Chingtoo; and the fifteen thousand cells
at Nanking, stand empty, like our fair-ground booths
between seasons, and down the walks blow the leaves of
the old examination papers, — a literary Vollombrosa in
autumn. Many of the ten thousand stalls at Canton,
which every traveler will recall by the fine camphor-
trees in the sixteen-acre park, have been razed to provide
a site for a modern university. Students who fail to
secure the highest degree recall as an ill omen the name
of the examination hall at Peking, that of " Intense
Mental Exercise." In these stalls the candidates remain
for days, until they complete their papers. Their name
is pasted within a fold of the paper, and the pocket is
not opened until the examiner has perused and marked
the answers. The students are expected to bring suf-
ficient food, tea and covering to last during their occu-

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 103

pancy, and they may not hold conversation with soldiers
on guard, or with other candidates. The booths are
rough brick constructions like sentry boxes, and are
often daubed in blue with some classical inscription.
While the lowest peasant may compete, four classes are
debarred, in this most democratic of countries, where
there has never been a nobility in perpetuity, except the
direct line from Confucius. The tabooed classes are
court eunuchs, barbers, actors and keepers of opium
dens (i.e., a class who answer to our saloon keepers).
As in every university, it is found that the higher edu-
cation emasculates the character and independence of a
small percentage. Certain students who pass high, and
are the sons of poor men, advertise that they offer them-
selves as the sons-in-law, or adopted sons of rich men
who have daughters but no sons. There is not a
Chinese, however poor, who will endure being without
some one to carry his name, and sacrifice to his manes
and tablet. He could not otherwise face death with
composure, or what is harder, he could not face this
obloquy of fortune during life. Even the beggars
and the lepers search the banks for some human drift-
wood to adopt. This motif takes the place in Chinese
novels of our theme of love, and is also the incentive
for most of their humor. The Chinese have furnished
historic proof that an eastern race being founded on
Thought, does not disintegrate when its men of action,
like Genghis and Kublai Khan, pass away. It is quite
a different thing to endow with Thought, and thus make
permanent a race founded on Action, — and so have
passed away, when their leaders fell, Nineveh, Mace-
donia, and the Empires of Charlemagne and Napoleon.
England and America jointly contribute five million

104 THE CHINESE

dollars a year toward the education of China, in the
salaries paid missionaries, colporteurs and medical men,
but this is a very small tax, considering the trade which
the two countries enjoy with China. As a trade meas-
ure alone, not to speak of a humanitarian one, let there
be more missionaries, — especially medical, — sent out,
and do not hamper them by confining them to didactics ;
let them put their hands to anything civilizing for the
precarious present.

There is something marvelously authoritative in the
clang of the cantankerous gong. Sleepy China, and even
the. sport-pursuing foreigner outside the gates, are obe-
dient in an instant. Insistence is shown by the rapidity
of the strokes. The gong saves China policemen. It
is the flare of the short sunset. At the southern gate
of one of the ten thousand walled cities of dragon land,
one hundred strokes are rapidly struck by the watchman.
Every one becomes his brother's policeman, and shouts
to his neighbor to hurry. There is a pause. One hun-
dred more strokes are rained upon the gong, in the fort
which is built upon the wall over the gate, where the in-
struments of the bonzes indicate that the sun has gone
down. Not all the gate towers are beautiful, Peking's
having little curl to the cornices and the structures being
too heavy. The Chien Mun gate, which the expedi-
tionary force blew up in 1900, was as plain as a gunny
godown. At Mukden, and indeed the deeper you go
into Manchuria and Mongolia, the more the artistic
wanes and the colder, older and sadder the forts and
everything else look. At Hang-chow, the gates are too
low and long for such heavy walls, though the cor-
nices have the grace that you expect in the happier
south. But at Kialing Fu is a beautiful gate-fort of

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 105

splendid proportions, with lofty sweep to the cornices,
grace in the lattice work, and adornment in the frieze.
The farther you go up the Yangtze, a kindlier sun and
sweeter air warm the heart and foster into flower the
artistic dreams of the native architect. The two story
guard-house on the wall over the low grim north gate
of Canton, is more ponderous than beautiful however.
One exception to the general stern style of the north is
the chaste and truly delightful pentagonal gate with
frieze through the Great Wall at Nankow.

Within a few minutes after the clangs of the last one
hundred strokes have died away, the crowd, — all but the
thief who is greasing his body and filling his rolled-up
queue with needles so you can not hold him by the tail, —
has divided between those who will remain in the stone
sheds among the vegetable and rice terraces, or stay
within the clamorous city, where half the traders keep
shop (not in their hats for they have none), in their
umbrellas. The ponderous iron-bound gate is dragged
shut with much laughter, chaffing and jeers at the gate-
men, who with earnest faces, excitement of manner, and
shouting san (get out of the way), drop the long
fastening bar into its socket. The clamps are padlocked
with enormous quaint brass locks, which any peasant
could pick with a rice-hook. The piratically inclined
have been known to use a little palm oil to lubricate their
exit, after the law had posted its warder. Outside the
gates, Leong has been jostled by Cheong. They drop
their bamboo poles and baskets ; rush at each other, plant
their feet in each other's stomachs and tug at each
other's queues. Nearly every southern Chinese is
subject to enlargement of the spleen, and therefore the
western method of fisticuffs has fortunately not been

106 THE CHINESE

adopted. The gate of a city is considered as holy as a
temple, and it is sacrilege to paste posters upon it. If
you would not invite bad fortune, you must leave a city
by a different gate from the one by which you entered
it. It is the hurried close of the race-meeting outside
the northwest walls of Peking in May. The evening
shadows are growing longer beneath the thirteen story
Buddhist monastery, and the roofs of the Taoist temple.
Some one announces that it is about time for the gongs
of Peking to sound their warning. The Chinese begin
to race home on foot. The last races are hurried, and
the mafoos hardly wait for their badges. Foreigners
mounted on mules, Mongol ponies, and India breds; in
chairs, in Peking springless carts, in 'rickishas, and on
foot, — all vanish into the advancing cloud of loess dust,
which swallows them, and move on to the Anting gate
just before it is closed for the night. Thus far at least
has our Occidental in exile become orientalized.

Half of the false hair used in America and Europe
is gathered in China. It is not uncommon for the river
pirates who infest the delta about Canton, to burst upon
a village, and after kidnapping for ransom all they can
conveniently convoy, to cut off every other queue they
can lay hold of. Rats are eaten by the extremely
ignorant in the superstition that the queue will grow
longer. In Shansi, human hair combings are collected
and woven at home into large over-socks for winter use.

The queue fills not only a roll of honor, but some-
times comes in for dishonor. On a March evening not
long ago, at Fat Shan on the delta of the Pearl, the
silk shop of my friend Tai Cheung, on Sui Tsun street,
was attacked at night in back and front. Four pirates,
with stones tied to the ends of bamboos, broke a hole

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 107

through the adobe wall at the back and entered. The
eight fokis (shop tenders) who were sleeping on the
premises, rushed to the front bars to escape from the
shooting in the rear. There sixteen other desperadoes
alarmed them with torches and drove them back. The
robbers herded the fokis in a corner, where they were
all tied, queues together, with wire to a post, where
these inglorious Celestial Samsons were later found by
the amused villagers. To complete the consternation of
the poor fokis, the thieves exploded bamboo bombs, and
with their arms full of bolts of silk, and shouting San
§P (scatter) to one another, they safely decamped.
There are also bands who make a specialty of robbing
the mulberry trees. A company recently stole upon the
Shun Tak community near Canton, with shears, ladders,
and bags. The villagers awoke to find their only
wealth, the lusang trees, denuded of every branch and
leaf. It is pretty hard to prove ownership of a mulberry
leaf, but the worms of the adjoining Sai Kwan district
proved to be exceedingly productive that season, — so
that the Shun Tak people retain their suspicions for a
retaliatory raid next season.

Some of the rich unquestionably eat fried silkworm
grubs which are fed on oak leaves, and some of the poor
eat non-poisonous snakes, cats and dogs. The last men-
tioned are sold slyly even in the British colony of Hong-
Kong, but this taste is not unknown in Europe. The
price of dog flesh in Hamburg, on July sixteenth, was
quoted at sixty pfennigs. In the cities of Cassel and
Chemnitz last year fourteen hundred dogs, and through-
out the German Empire about eight thousand dogs in the
same period, were slaughtered for food purposes.

Au Yang Kang, a butcher, recently made unblushing

io8 THE CHINESE

application to the Sanitary Board of the British colony
of Hong-Kong, for " permission to sell deer, snakes,
cats and dogs for food in the petitioner's shop on
Temple Street, Yaumati," on the Chinese mainland.
Their dog is stockier than the Esquimaux, which it most
resembles. Its plumed tail is curled well up on its back,
and it has a noble frill and mane. The color is either
solid black or solid tan. Those of black tongue and
black mouth are considered the purest in lineage. The
black dog is preferred when used for food. Its char-
acteristics are an absolute unfriendliness to every one ex-
cept its owner, and freedom from hydrophobia even in so
hot a climate. As a watch-dog it has no superior, never
attacking but barking like an irrepressible string of fire-
crackers. Its power in the shoulders makes it a useful
and most unique adjunct to sail and man in propelling
the barrows along the narrow, raised, country paths.

The Chinese seldom build oblong mounds over their
fens (graves). The rich of the southern provinces
adopt the conspicuous horseshoe brick work, in the toe
of which the urn or coffin is sealed. These spots are
chosen for the view they afford, which is an important
consideration in Fungshui geomancy. The poor build
merely a cone of earth over the urn, and into this is
inserted the wooden stick with its black letters. The
cemeteries cover a larger area than the cities of China,
which is an indisputable visual evidence both of the age
of the country, and the stability of its customs. Around
the mounds beyond the Porta Cerco gate at Macao, I
have seen the Heungshan farmers permit their water-
buffaloes to crop food. Who that has stood on Kwan
Yin Hill, beyond the north gate of Canton, and looked
into the necropolis of the ages which extends up the

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 109

acclivities of the White Cloud Hills, wide as the eye can
sweep beyond the walls, can for a moment feel that the
living speak as vastly as do the honored dead of this
city, which was sending out funeral processions two cen-
turies before Christ, while to-day those graves now being
dug are for the bones of Kwangtung men who died in
Africa, Australia, Panama, Saghalien and Demarara,
where they formed the advance guard of our occidental
civilization, Orientals though they were by blood and
birth? The white captains of steamers who are known
to exercise care that no Chinese emigrant dying en route
is buried at sea, are remembered by the guilds at Hong-
Kong with handsome silk banners testifying to their
" Honorable Benevolence " so truly Confucian in prac-
tice.

In the first part of April, when the earth and air is
joyous with oriental color, the hills around the cities are
crowded with those who come to perform pai shan,
or worship on the hills. Five foods are laid at the tomb :
duck, goose, fish, fowl and pig. Cousins come from dis-
tant points, and the festival is really their Christmas in
the sense of reunions, rejoicing and feasts. Part of the
ceremony is called Siu Fan Tai, " sweeping the tomb "
clean of leaves and dust in preparation for the kowtow.
The worshiper raises up his voice, invoking his ances-
tor, and declares: "Lo, I have swept thy tomb."
But the heart of the foreigner is touched by a closer
chord of pity for his own exiles, when his eye beholds
the white man's cemeteries on French and Dane's Islands
in the Pearl River.

In the funeral procession, the white lotus is carried as
the badge of mourning, and a sprig of growing bamboo,
to signify that the soul sprouts again in another world

no THE CHINESE

in another form. Pretty enough for any faith! The
red census slips on each side of the door are taken
down for a season, and white ones are pasted up.
A white lantern instead of a gaudy one is hung out at
night. White cord is braided in the queue. Indeed, if
you point to a funeral procession and ask a yokel what it
is, he will say " a white affair." Two conical incense
mounds are carried on a tray to be burned ; they are called
Chin Shan and Yin Shan (gold and silver mountains).
No procession is accorded to those who have not been
married. Such are hurried to the grave unescorted, save
by the two melancholy bearers and the parents. White
cakes are taken so that the soul of the deceased may in-
hale their fragrance. The priests are gowned in white.
The only legitimate widow, (the first), wearing white
flowers in her hair, is hurried along, led by a child. She
is expected to cry aloud, and should seem to make en-
deavor to break from the throng, so as to commit suicide
in faithful grief. Professional mourners, called " dogs
of the devil," wear white sheets over their shoul-
ders, weep tears and howl uninterruptedly, except when
they explode us Westerners by quickly changing to a
smile and nod for some passing acquaintance. A white
pall is thrown over the coffin, which is trotted along by
two or four bearers. Arriving at the grave, the bier is
approached by near friends, who call out the name of the
dead. Flowers are not sent, but friends contribute ban-
ners on which are emblazoned the offices and virtues of
the deceased.

The Chinese are always dramatic. There is a con-
siderable stretch between the sections. This is intended
to magnify, by repeating, the impression, so that the
word shall be passed several times down the streets:

Golf in the Graveyard of the Ages, Canton. South China. The spot

where all the Chinese of America state in their wills

that their bones must lie.

%^..ift-i;:^

' *

~V1S»

Sheep grazing in a graveyard of the poor, in the suburbs of Peking,
North China. Ancestor-worship has preserved these ceme-
teries to the clans, safe from intrusion by agricul-
ture or building for thousands of years. Two
topes to dead llamas in background.

Canal between native city and Shameen Island, where foreigners
live, Canton, South China.

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE in

" It is Hip Tong — it is Hip Tong — it is Hip long,
who is released to his ancestors." A wooden tab-
let with the name of the deceased is stuck in the pot of
ashes in the toy spirit house. In this tablet resides one
of the three souls of the man. Pirates steal these sacred
tablets for ransom. The Imperial family use blue for
anniversary mourning, though white is de rigeur for first
mourning. The largest grave section in the south is at
Chek Wan, situated on one of the branches of the Pearl
Delta, near Canton. Excursions are run by steamboat in
April, and one hundred thousand Chinese from Hong-
Kong and Canton make the pilgrimage. The festival
is a religious one and is called by the Hakkas Tsing
Ming, or " saluting of the hill." The exact date is set
by the emperor, who thus comes into intimate father-
hood with the poorest of his people, his office as priest
often protecting his weakness as king. The Board (Pu)
of Rites, realizing however the inadequate means of rural
transportation, and the inconvenience and sanitary danger
of throwing a crowd of scores of thousands into one
cemetery on a certain day, permits pilgrims a latitude of
two days before and after the official day, to pay their
worship at the tombs of their ancestors. A burial in
the small villages near Hong-Kong, like Lyee-moon and
Ngan Kok, costs twenty cents excluding the coffin, and
where the body is sculled to a cemetery a mile across
the bay, the cost is two dollars and a half. The desecra-
tion of a grave is a capital offense. The mausoleums of
the rich, with their terraces and Yunnan marble stairs, are
even more striking and costly that what our own ceme-
teries have to show. A native will not pass a cemetery
at night, without a lighted lantern. The Mohammedan
Chinese of Yunnan have a unique custom of whitewash-

H2 THE CHINESE

ing their graves, which point south. In Shensi remain
evidences of great dome-like mounds which are either the
graves of emperors, or the victims of famine from
drought or flood. So you may guess whether one man
or fifty thousand lie under each mound. Knowing what
I do of famines in China, I prefer to believe in the larger
number under each mound.

One of the saddest sights in the world is a clan's
charity cemetery. This is walled around, in contrast to
the ant-hill graves of the vast open hillside. Against
the middle of one wall is a noble shrine. The chasteness
of the design is not surpassed by any architecture ; walls
strong as the Egyptian, a colored tile roof with heavy
eaves, a fagade pure as the Doric. There is only the
curved line of the ridge to suggest what is characteris-
tically Chinese. Receptacles are made for the deposit
of prayer papers, spirit food and incense, the rites being
similar to the early Greek. The melancholy view is of
the 'stern field of death, with its closely placed conical
mounds which are built over the urns. At the foot of
the center path is the one stone, with the name of the
clan and the purpose of its charity for its poor members.
There is not a tree or a plant in the vast enclosure ; only
the silhouette of the white and green altar to the gods
of the clan, which has not moved from its countryside
for thousands of years. The baby towers, about which
so many misstatements have been made, are erected by
clan charity to " save the face," that is to say, to keep
the poor parent's pride from the humility of formally
asking charity from the clan. When the child dies, the
parent drops its body in the tower of silence, where it is
taken charge of by the clan officials, and a proper funeral
is given it, the parent mixing in the retinue, and it is

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 113

not altogether unknown whose child it is. There is a
great deal said of children being strangled and thrown
in the towers, but there is probably as much parental
affection in China as elsewhere. In contrast with this
austerity are the elaborate topes to dead Lamas, erected
in Shansi, Pechili and Thibet.

Much has also been written of the dangerous habit of
leaving bodies above ground, for it certainly is very com-
mon to see coffins scattered upon an open lot for months,
waiting for the lucky burial day (Fungshui), and the
exact spot that the geomancers are to choose. But as
the coffins are from six to eight inches thick, the joints
cemented, and the body placed in lime, they are as harm-
less above ground as under it, and one never hears of pes-
tilence resulting from the custom, except in a hurried
tourist's sketch. But China is now establishing news-
papers, and will prove the truth of what is written about
her.

In the futile ostentation of pride and the contumely
borne by poverty, the Chinese are not exempt from our
own experiences. In the ward of the coffin makers be-
neath the walls of Canton, near the Five Story pagoda,
is a Buddhist sanctuary for the dead. According to the
rent paid, a coffin and room are hired, and emblematic
food for the spirit and appeasing incense for the con-
trary spirits, are offered every day by the monks. Some
of the coffins like that of the Viceroy of Fu-kien or the
Tartar General Chung's which all retain the convex shape
of the tree, display the most gorgeous yellow lacquer ever
executed. As long as the family of the deceased remains
wealthy, this display is the envy of the townspeople.
When poppied time passes, and the fees are not paid, an-
other body is installed in both coffin and room. But this

ii4 THE CHINESE

is exactly the custom followed in our French and Span-
ish cities, as in the brick pile of rented tombs at St.
Roch's, New Orleans; in the tiers which adjoin the old
pit of ejected human bones at the Cristobal Colon Ceme-
tery at Havana, and in the long white alleys at Barcelona,
where trouble is not taken fully to obliterate the names
of the defaulting tenant before the new initials are painted
on the door. A foreigner (and I have known a mean
humorist to do it to sell his wares) who makes it known
to the mandarin and native community that he has bought
his grave plot in sacred China, at once secures irresistible
influence and affection from a people who see in this
act the highest proof of a feeling of brotherhood with
them.

The rivers of China bear an unusual alluvial richness to
the seas. Where America has one mile of river, China
has ten. The deltas and fishing banks around Canton
and Woosung are feeding grounds for innumerable shoals
of fish. The fish as they are caught are thrown into
flooded compartments (the Chinese invented the compart-
ment boat really for fishing purposes), and sold alive in
the markets of Hong-Kong. Your comprador learns to
judge by the dorsal fin as he chooses your dinner, and
your coolie dangles the struggling pomfret, garoupa, or
mullet from a grass thong as he marches behind your
'rickisha. The natives too often insist on the scales be-
ing scraped, while life is still pulsing in the victim. For
transportation inland, great sunfish, perch and ling are
salted and sun-dried. The Chinese is nauseated by no
degree of piscatorial decomposition, but he gets a good
deal of leprosy, according to some critics, from the dried
fish indulgence. In the higher country, northwest from
Canton, the peasants in the spawning season pull the

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 115

reeds, on which the eggs hang, from the rivers, and throw
them into pools. In this way their ponds are stocked
with carp. The silt of the Chu and Si Rivers has built
a vast fishing shoal about famous old Macao. This em-
porium of the far East during the fifteenth century lies
now like a stranded ship, melancholy in isolation.
" Magni nominis umbra." The red land dragon has
clutched her from the grasp of the green sea dragon. In
twenty-five years, seventy million metric tons of alluvial
deposit have been silted around the doomed port. Her
custom-house entries of clearances for Europe suddenly
closed sixty years ago. No fitter place could be chosen
than this blue-walled city, for a Goldsmith of the Sea to
sing the stanzas of a " Deserted Harbor."

The widest beach in the world is the famous half moon
beach between Ke Tae and Cacilhas. One can walk out
two miles at low tide. On the silver strand at high tide,
native fishermen dry their nets, which they have dyed with
an infusion of mangrove bark or gambier, to preserve
them. Others are poling their way along a net, and dart-
ing into the water at the end of a bamboo, an inverted half
cocoanut, to frighten the fish into the net. Tremendous
vigor is exercised in the animating scene. In the fish
market, below the three-storied stone building which has a
picturesque fourth story of bamboo, on the Inner Praya,
you can purchase a different species of fish every day of
the year, brought from the feeding shallows around Joao
and Lapa, particularly the delicious samli, and among
the others, hammer-headed shark, electric torpedo, cuttle,
gorgeous parrot, red sturgeon, eels, and anchovies.
While there are no lobsters in oriental waters, the Lung
Hai, or giant crawfish, affords a good substitute, and ef-
forts are now being made to transplant it to the American

n6 THE CHINESE

side of the Pacific. For river fishing, both cormorants
and otters are trained, — the latter, however, only being
used to drive the fish into the nets. Prawns are caught
in vast quantities all the way from Canton to Hong-
Kong, along the Ladrone and Lantao Islands, and even
back of Stonecutter's Island in Hong-Kong Bay, and the
paste is shipped to European purveyors. At the green
and slippy old stone wharf in front of the Harbor Of-
fice, Hong-Kong, you will notice the black oysters of
Amoy and Fu-chau being landed, but don't eat them if
you value your life, except in December, when they are as
delicious as the dark oysters of New Orleans. You will
notice that the bones of the pike are green and the
chickens' bones dark. There is no doubt that the fish,
feeding in the estuaries of the Canton and West Riv-
ers, are affected by the mineral matter, in the loess,
which the rivers carry down from the heart of the
country.

If forests were planted at the headwaters to stay the
floods, and equalize the flow during all the year, China
would add to her wealth in soil half a billion dollars a
year. But there was an instance where a sudden increase
in the wealth of the agriculturists of a land, troubled in
other directions, made possible a revolution, as in the days
preceding Cromwell, and there might be a repetition of
this condition here. As soon as the American western
states fifteen years ago threw off their farm mortgages,
which had been oppressing them for twenty years, the
propaganda which flowered in Roosevelt's criticisms be-
gan for the elimination of the usurious oppression and
discriminating legislation from which they had suffered
during those " twenty years of Egypt."

In metal and wood work, the native artisan sticks to

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 117

his bow drill. He draws the cord to and fro with effect-
iveness, but at a painful waste of energy, as he applies the
weight of his chest for pressure. The Chinese are en-
tirely without steam circular saw mills. The great logs
of teak which come from Siam, and pine from Oregon
and the Yalu, are tilted up, while a man standing on the
log, and one crouching under it, push a hand-saw. I
have seen concrete double walled buildings, six stories
high, and taking up a square, being erected in Hong-
Kong, with the sawyers alongside preparing the teak
beams in this ancient and picturesque fashion. The Eng-
lish architects brought boilers out, but they always have
and always will grow wheezy in the hands of the Sawyers'
Guild, even in treaty ports. Joiners use a saw having
a blade fifteen inches long, and widest at the end, where
it measures five inches across. It tapers toward a bam-
boo handle. One edge is set for cross-cut, and the other
for rip. The dust is drawn with the upward stroke,
which is the thousand and first tiring instance, given by
the telescope man, that " everything is opposite in China."
Smooth and able racing boats are built at about half what
they would cost in America, and the clerk who in Eng-
land was elate with a whirl in the Tupenny Tube and
a 'bus ride to Hampstead Heath, here blossoms out as a
boat owner in his second year of indenture. The Royal
Hong-Kong Yacht Squadron turns out a respectable fleet
of thirty half-raters, and several two-stickers and yawls,
all erected, and many of them designed, by Chinese boat
builders like Ah Kee. In the cup-like harbor, set about
with the lofty Hong-Kong and Kowloon blue ranges, the
dipping sails and bubbling scuppers of the fleet make a
picture a little more animating than porcelain, and cer-
tainly dearer to the exile, because it has that touch of

u8 THE CHINESE

home which made Fong, the Chinese emigrants' poet, say :
" They love home most who never have one."

The meal of the Chinese bon vivant (the effete treaty
ports have them all) begins with samschu, rice wine,
served hot. The cups must be inverted with some em-
phasis, as they are emptied. The cup is not lifted by
the fingers, but is rather placed in the hollow of the
hand, and then raised. The wine contains only fifteen
per cent, of alcohol. Soups, which close the repast, are
of the delightful birds' nest, brought from Moscos Island
in Burmah, sweet lotus, fungus, sprouted bean, and
pigeons' egg. Between are served Sam See Chee, a
hash of shark, pheasant, chicken and bamboo shoots;
yauk, a jelly of pounded rice and oil; wo ap, bone-
less dried duck which has an Egyptian taste of mummy
wrappings; Mut kim ghet, a preparation of Chinese
golden lime; boh loh, made with pineapple; lichee
gon, the Imperial nuts with a raisin taste; sedge root
and water chestnuts. Raw fish and legs of frogs, called
Ye Sang, taken from the flooded rice swamps, are
not infrequently eaten, now that ice is obtainable to make
them appeal to the gourmet. Eggs are preserved in a
paste of saltpetre, soy and earth for periods so long that
they are blackened with their sulphur, and taste like our
high school boy's experiment in sulphurated hydrogen.
In Che-kiang Province hams are pickled in soy sauce.
Hoi Shum, or sea slug from Korean waters, is first
dried, then steamed, and served with pigeon. Cakes are
made of fried grasshoppers. Of all gastronomical de-
lights to the foreigner is the Chinese shad or samli
of the Canton estuary, a fish half between our shad and
pompano in taste. Nearly equal as a prandial delicacy
is the pih fan yu, or white rice fish, which is breaded.

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 119

Your army officer at the club will call for salmon; he
means polynemus. It is like our salmon in taste and is
the only pink fish in the far East.

Oranges are skilfully opened, filled with various colored
jellies, carefully sealed and brought to the table again ait
naturcl. The dwarf kin-kew, or golden orange, popu-
larly known as the ktitnquat, is preserved whole, and is a
delicacy which immediately makes you declare you even-
tually wrill love the country despite much. The tart loquat
tastes and looks like a cross between a grape and an
orange. The green, curling fern and seaweed from
Korea, are prepared as we serve spinach, and plum ker-
nels are fried in oil. Tea is drunk as the Germans in the
East handle cocktails; i. e., the cups are raised in salute
and drained simultaneously. A guest receives his cup
with both hands. Should an invited guest be absent
through illness, the meal is sent to his house. Among the
gifts is a beautiful basket, which is filled with rice, and a
selected branch of arbor-vitae or pine is inserted to imitate
a potted tree, beneath the branches of which nuts and
fruits are spread on the white ground.

A Chinese never takes his politeness humorously.
Therefore I have not entered the following anecdote
among the humorous paragraphs. Their unlucky num-
ber is fourteen. A host found himself, because of dec-
linations, with thirteen guests at his table. To relieve
his consternation, Li Chong spoke forth : " Never
mind, I shall be the one who will keep his drum head
slack in patience; from sweetmeat to soup I shall not
eat at all, and therefore I am not here." Native gentle-
men generally hire for their dinner parties, a large restau-
rant, or club, which has facilities for histrionic
presentations. Sometimes these festivities last two days,

120 THE CHINESE

and the bill includes cost of lanterns, presents to bonzes,
and 'rickisha hire. A man's love for his women folk is
proved by the number of times he sends " regrets " to a
banquet, for the meal comes home. Hats are worn
throughout. They are generally silk skull caps, to pro-
tect the shaven heads. Melon and sunflower seeds, and
green cayenne pods are continually passed to the company
of singing girls, who come to recite and dance, if the
banquet is an official one. Cassia, mushrooms, fish gills,
pheasant, partridge, snipe, and reed-birds in abundance,
prawns, carambola fruit, almond custard, orange wine,
steamed sharks' fins, chicken cooked with rice wine, gin-
ger, soy, sesamum, peanut oil and herbs, — are all drawn
upon by these versatile cooks in preparing their menus,
especially when a foreigner is to be invited. Whole roast
pigs and hares are brought on gilded, just as was the
Milanese custom in the fourteenth century. The meal
ends with a draft of hot chook (rice soup), and a
towel, dipped in hot water, is drawn across the face. Hot
as is the climate, its lassitude seems to create a craving
for hot foods. The foreigner probably over-indulges in
spiced Indian chutneys and curries, and the native in the
betel-pepper leaf.

So much of the imported liquors and comestibles for
the white man's consumption in the tropics (canned
goods, claret, beer, champagne, etc.) are preserved by
acids, it is now not uncommon to see in the papers an
advertisement like the following : " Tuborg beer, ten
dollars and a half Mexican, forty-eight quarts, guaranteed
free from salicylic acid." Despite the discouragement,
the foreigner in the treaty port does not seem to forsake
foods which have the acid, and if he ever returns home he
brings to his physician a stomach as useless as a sponge.

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 121

Ice is now fully appreciated in the household menage, and
at Ningpo the heavily thatched ice-houses are conspicuous
along the river front. At Hong-Kong, of course, the ice
is made by machinery. If your native cook gets a fowl
which he believes will be a tough problem, he hangs it
among the papaw's branches over night, in the belief that
the exhalation from the leaves will have a mollifying
effect. Few Chinese comestibles are immersed in the
water and boiled. They are placed in perforated vessels
above the water and steamed. We who are used to the
pasty manner in which our cooks destroy the beauty of
boiled rice, will be surprised to notice this article of food
cooked on the meanest sampan in a manner to keep each
grain light, separate and dry to handle. The rice is made
appetizing by taking with it portions of kumchi, a sort
of sauerkraut. Economy in fuel and in the use of the chop
sticks have created the custom of cooking meats only
when they are cut up in small pieces. When one has
eaten heartily, and the affable host inquires if the meal
has been sufficient, it is quite polite to use the idiom:
" My stomach is as tight as a marshall's drum head."
Spartans, too, are they on occasion, for they have a
proverb : " He only is a man who can exist on petsai
stalks." Outside of the treaty ports, beef is a flesh un-
tasted by even the rich Chinese, because one hash would
cost as much as the whole animal. The poor could not
afford to pay the price ; the few well-to-do in the village
might not have the beef appetite on the one day, and the
owner of the carcass could not keep over what he did not
use, as ice can not be procured inland. A Chinese, in ex-
pressing how much land it takes to support a man, says :
" One acre for six mouths.*

Where we raise whisky and tobacco smugglers, the

122 THE CHINESE

Chinese discover opium and salt evaders of the Imperial
Customs. First a pirate at Canton ; then a salt smuggler
farther up the Pearl, is Ng Po's descent to civilization,
for later we shall find him buying out a degree and a
squeeze mandarin-ship, say on the West River (now be-
come the most notorious pirate waters of the world),
not too far from his former haunts, if he ever wants or
needs to return to them. Visitors to Canton and Macao
will recall the well built British river-boats, Heung-
shan, Fatshan, and Honam, and the Chinese built
Tai On, with thousands of coolies battened like cattle
in the 'tween decks under bars ; the barred ports ; and the
uniformed Sikh and Portuguese guards, bristling with
rifles, bayonets and pistols, parading by every hatchway
on the saloon deck, where the foreigner is accommodated.
Glancing up at the pilot-house, your eye is met by a
rack of glistening rifles at the quartermaster's back. It
used to be quite common in Cantonese and Macaense
waters for Chinese pirates (they are nearly always natives
of turbulent Kwangsi Province, and have aboriginal blood
in their veins) to come aboard as passengers, and when
the vessel had got under the lee of Lantao Island, to
swarm over the saloon deck, and compel the quarter-
master to run for the Ladrone Islands, or into the hundred
and one creeks of the estuary of the Sikiang, where the
boat was robbed and perhaps scuttled, and pursuit as
effective as following quicksilver uphill. The world was
first startled by the Namoa tragedy on December loth,
1890. A British motor-boat has been looted within the
shadow of the bund at Samshui. The American launch
Comet was boarded in 1906 within sight of the guns of
Whompoa.

Only lately at Lapa Island, across Macao's inner har-

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 123

bor, three hundred pirates withstood government troops
at Naiwan Mun. The quaint unpainted junks of Macao
all carry old-fashioned cannon in the stern (they mean
to run while they fight for it), and stinkpots (bamboo
fuse grenades). It is hard to tell when the marauders
are pirates and when government troops, and when the
Chinese are criticized concerning this delinquency in
patriotism, they ask us where in our own civilization,
American as well as Russian, notorious detective or-
ganizations draw the line, when receipts are low, be-
tween blackmail which they manufacture, and crime
which they pursue. As the steamers from Wuchow
come down the Rhine of China, the Sikiang, they
are often fired upon from the sorghum brakes by these
marauders, who wait until the native and foreign gun-
boats, like the United States monitor Monadnock, are
out of echo. Some years it has been necessary to convoy
merchantmen with the two British, two French, one Ger-
man, and one American gunboats which make headquar-
ters at Hong-Kong. Underwriters are declining risks on
the river. It is now proposed to equip the gunboats and
merchantmen with Marconi, and allow Robert Bredon's
Customs Service to police the river with part of China's
new navy, transferred for that purpose. Only during the
Viceroyalty of Li Hung Chang, with Cromwellian sever-
ity, has the Sikiang (West River) been safe from Can-
ton to Wuchow, and Hong-Kong asserts that the Kwang-
tung government can, if they desire to, police the Siki-
ang as satisfactorily to foreign commerce as the stern
Hupeh government polices the Hun River. The traveler
on the West River ten years ago will recall the three pirate
chimneys on Spike Hill, just past the old capital of Shui
Hing. The pirates were thrust in the chimneys heads

124 THE CHINESE

downward, and the tops were bricked in. Canton in-
dulges in a little bit of ceremony in beheading its crim-
inals, but in the smaller towns, as at Wuchow, the pirate
is hastened out from the bar to the hillside, and in the
presence of a few, including one mandarin on a pony
(which must be turned backward for superstition's sake),
the victim, who is opiated, is made to kneel while his feet
are tied; a rope is put around his neck, and when the
swordsman is ready, the neck is quickly drawn out ; there
is a flash of steel and all is over.

It must be remarked that the irreconcilable attitude to
the foreigner, so noticeable at Canton, has been fixed
there since the opium war of 1840, and the pirate attacks
are not the only evidence of it. The desperation of pov-
erty is the cause of the pirates' ranks being increased in
times of famine. In 1906 at Canton the silk crop failed,
owing to unusual floods, and the tea crop on the hills was
also poor, because fertilizer was not brought up owing to
flooded paths. Cotton yarn dealers failed because con-
sumers could not pay or borrow. Piracy grew stronger
and bolder, and the Sainam tragedy on July I3th, where
foreigners lost their lives, ensued. The pirates brought
five narrow snake-boats alongside for an hour, to take off
the valuables. The marauders burned their clothes for-
ward on deck. The crews of the snake-boats were also
naked and painted, all for the purpose of outwitting
identification. The Sainam is a pretty little stern
wheeler of five hundred and seventy tons. The British
minister at Peking, incited by the persistent clamor of
Hong-Kong, vigorously demanded the transfer of Vice-
roy Shum from Kwangtung Province. It was granted
and Chang Jen Chun sent, as another evidence that Hong-
Kong is as yet master over growling Canton in matters

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 125

of the peace, and who shall say she will not some day
complete her ambition by purifying Canton's debased cur-
rency and sanitary conditions, and expediting her railway
building.

As piracy of this sort is not infrequent as near Europe
as the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, unpoliced China can
perhaps be treated len.iently, for, as a rule, she furnishes
more spice than danger to travel, so far as the foreigner
is concerned. Who is there who would not rather cross
China unaccompanied than brave Turkey with a caval-
cade? Only as long ago as Buckingham's regime,
piracy in English waters was tolerated for a fee, two
hundred and forty-eight ships having been seized be-
tween Dover and Newcastle in one year. We can not
condemn Chinese mandarins and their civilization of this
time, without condemning English statesmen, judges like
Sir Henry Marten, and the civilization of our great-
grandfathers' time. The day when authority will walk
with modern emphasis and frequency up and down the
path of commerce is not far off, even in so vast a country
as China. She has first been gathering money for light-
ing her night walks, and it is satisfactory to state that
the recurrent flash of historic old Guia at Macao (the
first lighthouse in China) was followed by Robert Hart's
provision of some sixty lights along the coast, which has
made the rapidly increasing navigation wonderfully safer.
The Imperial Customs paid for this improvement, making
the sea-going nations, as well as the Chinese, double
debtors to this the most thorough foreigner who has ever
given his life service to China, a veritable Daniel working
for the people of Darius.

When you pass the pickets of your native friend's com-
pound, it is a sign of superior breeding to cough purposely

126 THE CHINESE

(we may even say, conspicuously to expectorate), so that
none of the opposite sex may linger longer than the time
necessary to discover that the visitor is a man. When
the women have escaped you shout " Li," which is an
order for the house coolie to come and receive your long
red card. It would express the lowest breeding to ask
your host : " How is your wife ? " Wife and daughters
must remain unmentioned; their privacy is like their
honor, inviolate; they live only in the husband's and
father's eye. Mixed social gatherings never occur.
There are no women on the Chinese stage. Among the
better class, the boys and girls of the family are entirely
separated after the age of six. There is nothing among
their middle class of that curse of American and Euro-
pean cities, " a street education " after school hours.
Whatever may be the result of the Chinese system in
individual development; however narrow the wife's social
sphere may be by reigning alone in a feminine world, the
intent is sincere, and based upon the lofty desire not to
soil women even so much as with the opportunity for
temptation. No modern novel has been written in China,
because no fingers have been scorched, and in their
measures for prevention and severity upon offenders, the
Confucians say they only agree with the compilers of the
Pentateuch. As soon as a child rises in the morning,
the first duty is to repair to the parent's room, and inquire
as to his or her health. And so through life, the filial
service and ceremonial broaden, to be looked forward
to by the son as likewise his privilege through the long
golden evening of age. The saddest story in our Scrip-
tures to the Chinese is the tale of Jacob shorn of his sons,
looking Egyptward. Relationship is called a " joint " ;
i. e., second cousin is " second joint."

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 127

Womanhood for the first time has been addressed
in an official document. Viceroy Chang Chi Tung
of Wuchang has compiled an elaborate legal book
(meddling missionary propaganda, take note!) of
the cases from earliest times between the Chinese,
missionaries and converts. The book is inscribed
to " The fathers and mothers of the people."
The great port Yochow, at the confluence of the
Yangtze and China's greatest lake, translated means
" Mother in Law." The culture of women is re-
peatedly praised in the histories, novels and works of
philosophy. A mother is expected to teach her boy until
he can go to school, and most of the education of the
daughters devolves upon the mothers. Mixed schools are
abhorred, and girls are not permitted to leave their
mother's sight. Chapels of missionaries have a curtain
down the middle of the room, so that neither sex may
intrude upon the other but may at the same time hear
the speaker and join in the singing and responses. The
native text books for girls set forth that the culture of
Mencius, their second greatest writer, was due to his
mother's teaching, and one of China's lesser classics,
dating back to B. C. 120, is the Lieh Nu Chuen (History
of Cultured Women). Chinese literature has its Jeanne
d'Arc heroine in the warlike virgin Wha-Mou-Loh. In
some homes, paintings of the Mother of Buddha are to
be seen. Prince Ching of the Imperial Household, and
Governor Chow of Mukden, in their support of the new
educational system, advocate its extension by sending girls
abroad, or at least to introduce foreign college bred gov-
ernesses.

Throughout the empire, the pai-lau (memorial
Arches) are the most conspicuous architecture next to

128 THE CHINESE

the pagodas. Many of these are erected in honor of
chaste or learned women, and widows who would not
marry a second time, or, as their epigrammatists say:
" The lady who the second time married the white
flower in her hair," referring to the fashion of widows.
As these pai-lau monuments take an important place in
the education of the people, the choosing of the inscription
is reserved for the throne, through the Censor Pu
(Board). An important class in the community are the
mei-jin (between people), who arrange marriages. The
mother of the family has a hundred and one conferences
with them, and on them, in her seclusion, she relies for
the dainty bits of gossip of the town, all the more colored
by an imagination removed, because one could not go and
prove the facts. An important present from the youth
to his betrothed is a ham, of which she sends back the
foot for good luck, the idea being the same as our darky's
esteem for a rabbit's foot. When the samschu cups of
bride and groom are raised, you will notice they are joined
by a thread, which should on no account be broken. It
often is, however, for there is rough teasing, lao-shing-
fang (bride-baiting) of the bride of fourteen years.
February with them takes the place of our June as the
popular hymeneal month. Only the office of hien-pi
(first wife) is recognized by the ancestral religion, and
the children of the tsieh (concubine) are enrolled on the
family tablets as though they were the issue of the liicn-
pi. This differs not essentially from the ways of patri-
archal Israel.

The Chinese insist in their critical moods that there
are fewer concubinage marriages in China, under the
law, than there are clandestine double households with-
out the law's pale, in the life of the Occidental. High

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 129

buildings, and the Tangerian custom of mounting
to one's roof, are abhorred by the Chinese as the grossest
kinds of intrusion. One's wall can on no good account
be looked over; it is the protection of women from the
unchaste and forward, and is therefore thick and high,
and often stronger than the house itself. The women
of China have a more cumbersome menage to run than
our women have, which speaks for their patience, industry
and cleverness. They have no ready-made, automatic
providers, such as laundries, abattoirs, schools, depart-
ment stores, telephones, daily mail service, etc., to assist
them in attending to the wants of the men and children,
and yet, at the temples, on the street, or upon evenings
in the garden, it can not be said that their families bear
the evidence of household neglect. It must not be con-
sidered that the Chinese do not think themselves good-
looking. You can frequently hear their women, when
they are commenting on a foreigner, whose face conforms
somewhat to their standards, remark : " Why, she is
nearly as good looking as we are."

In every hong (office) ; in every rice and fish shop; in
the stern of every sampan, the brewed tea is left handy,
and the porcelain from which you drink it always has a
painting of Mon San Gun, the god of longevity, so that
you may drink to your own " long life." The Chinese
of the south pronounce it " chah," and say : " It is as
sweet as a sparrow's tongue." In the theater, and fan-
tan gambling-house, it is brought to you as a gift from
the management. I suppose the Chinese average a gallon
a day. They seem utterly indifferent to its toxic qual-
ities. In India and Ceylon, tea is manufactured entirely
by machinery, but in China the opposite is the case. In
some parts, where they have learned the habit from the

130 THE CHINESE

Russians, Mongolians grind their tea, as we do coffee,
and make an infusion of the powder. The indulgence
has one good property, in that the malarial waters of the
land are not used unboiled. The wells of all the walled
cities are revolting. In the country, however, the drawers
do not soil the spring, but lead the stream along cut bam-
boo troughs to a roadside, where it trickles without un-
usual contamination into the buckets. The bush, being
of the camellia family, likes a loose, hilly soil, such as
the ranges of Nganwei, where the green tea comes from ;
damp heat; showers; fog and sun bursting through with
tropical intensity, all of which south China is ready to
furnish to the letter, Nature being more anxious to pro-
duce tea than men. The leaf of a full-grown tea-bush
is larger than Westerners would think, viz. : two and one-
half inches long. The flower is white, with petals set like
a cherry's, but the bloom is not thickly sown in the bush.
The translations of the familiar brands are interest-
ing: oolong meaning black snake; souchong, small leaf,
being picked before the February rains; pccoc, white
fur, from the fuzz on the leaf of the season's first crop
of the three-year-old plant, and congou, well rolled.
The plants from the famous Dragon's Pool Garden have
been successfully transplanted to South Carolina. The
s'econd picking takes place after the first light rains of
June. After the last crop, the clippings of the stems
and branches are saved and sent to the poor of Japan,
who use it for a tea called bancha. Each crop affords
about four hundred pounds of dried tea per acre. The
curing of black tea is tedious, every leaf being opened
by hand four times after each passing over the charcoal
fire, three times in a latticed basket, and once in a metal
pan. It is called Ki (flag), when it easily unrolls, and

Country scene 400 miles inland, tea district, Kiang-si province,
bushes on foothills: rice (paddy) fields in meadow. The
modern houses are erected by Russians to store tea.

An irrigated valley of rich Hunan province, Central China, 600 miles

from the coast, where natives are patriotic for a modern

China and are most unfriendly to foreigners. Hunan is

ruled rigorously by Viceroy Chang Chih Tung.

Flat, rice-growing country of North sea coast, outside Tientsin.

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 131

Tsiang (awl), when through perfected fermentation, it
keeps its dry, tight curl. Expert knowledge is required
to know how much fire the leaf will bear, the object being
to get the last particle of moisture out, and as this is un-
dertaken in a moist climate, the tea workers have an ar-
duous task. The leaf ferments between the first and
second firings, with the result that some of the injurious
tannic acid is turned to sugar. This rehandling and
fermentation is not done with green tea, the leaf of which
is allowed to dry after one firing. In the final drying a
room called the " human oven " is heated, into which the
workers rush with covered mouths for a minute each time
to rescue the laden bamboo baskets.

The success of the Chinese tea is well known. Only
their leaf keeps strength for long periods. Moreover, the
Chinese tea has the largest percentage of theine (the ex-
hilaration and perspiration principle), with the least pro-
portion of the poisonous tannin, the toxic principle, so
abundant in Ceylon tea. The Assam leaf is larger and
coarser than that of China proper, and is only fit for black
tea of an inferior grade. The blackness of some brands
of tea is brought about by arrested fermentation. The
Chinese themselves secure a stronger effect from their tea,
as there is no necessity for them to brew the highly dried
varieties. They use the greener uncurled leaf, just as we
might take six leaves of an ash tree, and put them in a
small cup. These bunches of uncurled leaves are tied into
pretty packages with silk. The infused leaf is also eaten
as a salad. The different aromas of tea are produced by
azalea, orange, jasmine, or tuberose petals, according to
whichever bloom may be out at the time of the tea-pick-
ing. Last spring the price of tea materially increased on
account of the scarcity of the jasmine flower. An

THE CHINESE

astringent tea of delicate odor is prepared from the tea
flowers. The oppressed tea growers of China are
assessed an export (loti) tax as high as twenty-five per
cent, of the value of the tea, and this five years ago nearly
throttled the trade.

Though Russians have the name of being the largest
tea patrons of China, Australians really lead with a con-
sumption of eleven pounds a year per head, against two
pounds in America, while the vinous French are at the
foot of the procession with three-tenths of a pound.
China sells Russia sixteen million pounds of black tea
each year. A vast deal of it is ground and pressed into
bricks at Tokmakoff's Russian factory at Han-kau, where
you will find a dominating colony of Russians. The
bricks are an inch thick, and nine by twelve inches
across. Some Americans who have lived in China long
enough to become tea-soaked find on returning home
to their trying climate that they can not touch the
cup at all, especially if it is the tannic green tea, a
few cups a day soon producing tea-poisoning with most
distressing feelings. Indeed, those who are thus sensitive
are compelled to give up every excitant for years, whether
alcoholic, drug or tannic. The strongest tea known to
the Chinese is grown at Pu Erh in Yunnan, and is war-
ranted to curl a novice up as though he were the fired leaf
itself. Perhaps the strangest of all the tea preparations
is the Thibetan's. The infusion of tea is poured into a
wooden bowl. Goat's butter and barley flour are added,
and all are beaten into a dough called " Jamba," which is
eaten warm. This, with uncooked powdered mutton
(even lumber powders in high, dry Thibet) are the main-
stays of the daily meal. That China teas are coming into
their own again was evidenced last June at the opening

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 133

of the Canton market, when the highest bids of ten years
were recorded. Emphatically, the difference between
theine and tannin is important, and no physician, who
works upon the Chinese plan of being paid for keeping
his patients well, should fail to enroll himself on the side
of Chinese teas against the world.

I picture a tea scene, which may be upon your porcelain
saucer, but in reality is among the famous Sunglo Hills
of Nganwei Province, where the able late Empress Dow-
ager was born, though she was of Manchu blood. The
slopes and peaks rise everywhere. Here and there you
can discover the huts of the pickers, nestled below the
cultivated terraces. It is just dawn when the women
(the older ones with untidy hair) come forth with their
crates to essay their long tasks. The girls wear yellow
pomegranate flowers in their hair, and are as merry as
the birds which dart among the bamboos which have been
set for wind-breaks. There is little light or view, for the
mist still delays to rise and roll. The workers call out
to one another in falsetto tones, as they cross paths, and
inquire which hill they have chosen for the day. They
separate into couples, who take turns in holding
down the top branches for the other to pick the leaves.
The tops are picked first ; it makes selected drying. The
gatherers are working with speed, hot as it is, for the
rains threaten. Jokes are passed : " I've picked enough
to make a Hung Mao's (Englishman's) head go round
like a bamboo water-wheel." When the baskets are
heaped, so that the cover is put down with difficulty (it
is too windy on these uplands to rely on a stone for
weight) the pickers do not wait for the collectors, but
wend their way back to a receiving hut set beside a lotus
pool, where willows grow. Do not be irreverent, Hung

134 THE CHINESE

Mao, and say the willows are there to supply adulteration !
Banter is the diversion of those who are resting. As
through all the world, when women become manual
workers, their talk verges on masculine humor. The
branches and stony hills have torn their feet, clothes and
hair, and the wind, too, has added his derision. The
poor mortals look miserable enough. Until sundown
they work on the hill, staying longest at the southern
portion, for there the leaves are thickest. Until midnight
they labor in the firing rooms, which are lit with smoky
nut-oil lamps. Before the jasmine bud has spilt its ma-
tutinal libation of attar beneath the window of their sleep-
ing rooms, the bronzed toilers have arisen, and gone forth
again with laughter unto the hill which never sleeps, be-
cause it must work for a foreign world which never ceases
to thirst.

The most gruesome feature of the fatalistic Chinese
and Japanese character, — the quality which makes them
terrible as well-led soldiers, — is their stolid view of death.
The Japanese hara-kiri, imposed for political or battlefield
failures, has done more to ostracize the Japanese from
occidental sympathy than our jealousy of their success,
or irritation at their trickiness. In China a coolie any-
where can be bought for two hundred dollars, paid to his
family, to jump from behind a mound, and take the place
of the quail or pheasant, when the authorities wish to
cause a scandal, and stop shooting by foreigners in the
grave districts. When China's first railroad of twelve
miles from Woosung to Shanghai was built in 1876, we
all remember that a native, whose business of tugging
boats along the river was threatened by the new enter-
prise, deliberately walked in front of the train. His
death, of course, accomplished the purpose of the manda-

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 135

rins in starting an effective boycott against the innova-
tion. The repetitions of this sacrifice on the national
altar (as they see it) on the Yuet-Han, Peking-Han-kau,
and other railways, have been frequent. The Chinese
method of suicide among unhappily betrothed girls is to
take an over-dose of opium; among men, the larynx is
opened, or the victim hangs himself, which last is the
method official Peking favors for the political non
gratas.

Tientsin and Mongolian larks are matched to sing at
daybreak. To the open field, even to the lawn under the
English Club's windows at Hong-Kong, the cages are
brought, and set out on the grass by the native silk mer-
chants, who are not too dignified to run after grasshoppers
to reward their pets. Over the dewy lawn the owners
saunter and enjoy the only refreshing coolness of the
tropical day. As the sun bursts out in his glory, the
birds are set free and matched in song. The gentry take
infinite delight in the conquests of their prized singers.
Some cost as high as twenty-five dollars each, which is
a fortune in China. Who can gainsay that something
patient and good lies in the hearts of a people, who can
find that such pastimes, even to full manhood, afford
untiring pleasures?

The youths of thirteen to seventeen, gathered on the
Praya in groups of six or more on a side, dexterously use
their feet in back and side kicks as a battledore, to keep
a shuttlecock in the air for minutes at a time. No boxing
ring ever trained so well for shiftiness. The boys excel
in kite-flying. In the ports like Hong-Kong, where there
are overhead wires of a modern civilization, there is a
ludicrous hanging out of all kinds of derelict air-ships
and their tangled cables. Dragons, hawks, larks and fish

136 THE CHINESE

are all represented in the shapes. Faces of the gods are
painted on round and oblong disks. On the strings are
hooks, blades, and pasted ground glass. Great skill is
shown in the mid-air battles, as the kites are maneuvered
into conflict. A hook tears out the body of a dragon, and
the wreckage comes to earth to the great delight of the
assailant. Or a string is broken, and a god goes soaring
cloudward. It is considered an ill omen to allow the
possession of the heavenly being to evanesce into the
ethereal again. A Chinese nurse teaches her charge that
it is auspicious to dream of a mountain, an eagle, an egg-
plant, a funeral, a snake, a horse ; or to meet a priest the
first thing upon the road. It is lucky to be erroneously
reported dead, and a mirror hung over the door keeps
away bad fortune. It is obviously ominous to trip in a
cemetery. When Chinese children wish to express de-
rision, they do not make faces, but catch up the corners of
their tunics and shake them.

The Chinese, with his paint brush, takes twice our time
to execute his letter, but with his swanpan or abacus, he
counts twice as quickly as we do, so that clerical honors
are even. In recording time, the year of the sovereign's
reign is generally used, though there is a cycle system
among the Buddhists, based on every sixty years as the
length of a good man's life, in which modesty of allot-
ment the race confesses its inferiority in medical science,
as compared even with the times of the Psalmist.

About two hundred thousand people live in boats on
the river at Canton, and fifty thousand at Hong-Kong.
It is this custom which makes it possible for such losses
of life to occur in typhoons, as in the catastrophe of Sep-
tember, 1906, at Hong- Kong. The passenger steamer
arriving at Canton from Hong-Kong has an exciting pas-

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 137

sage through the narrow lane which is cleared through
the sampan fleet. The fleet must anchor at night in
regular lanes, each boat having a stated place. Tens of
thousands of the people never go ashore. Doctors,
priests, mendicants, traders, artisans, gamblers, and
strumpets (shoi kee), all ply their trade by boat through-
out this floating village. At night each boat is compelled
by law to hoist to the masthead a light, which generally
burns nut-oil. As one looks from the city walls, the
view is that of the Milky Way turned upside down.
The panorama at night, especially during the Moon
Feast, from Hong-Kong's signal staff on Victoria Peak,
fifteen hundred feet directly above the Colony's sampan
fleet, is even finer. The boat women all carry their
children papoose fashion, and as the repetition is fre-
quent, the girls of eight must carry their youngest
brother but one, to aid the mother, who with one hand
holds an infant, and with the other guides the sampan's
tiller or handles the sail halyards. The younger children
sprawling about the decks, have dried bottle-gourds
strapped to their shoulders to assist in supporting them,
should they fall overboard. A Chinese goes overboard
feet first, and not head first in his dive.

It is to take the wings of Aeolus, to step into one of
these passenger boats when the wind is on the quarter.
The boats are flat-bottomed, eighteen feet long, with a
narrow racing prow, latticed rudder, single square sail, no
jib, and ballasted heavily. The bamboo battens, stretched
across the sail, enable the crew to haul their sampan some-
what on the wind, but the performance at best is a sorry
one. Such a sail of course reefs itself instantly, and upon
this quality in a storm, the crew depends more than on the
ballast. When the wind is untoward, the woman sculls,

138 THE CHINESE

and her husband in the bow has to exert himself with
oars long enough to clear the wide waist of the boat.
The passenger crouches in a bamboo coop, and from the
second hatch in front of him peep the tenantry of chil-
dren, chow dogs and chickens, while as company for
himself, he hears the metallic scampering of the cock-
roaches along the three seats around him. On the
larger junks, when the wind is adverse, the long spliced
sweeps, made from whole fir trees, are unshipped. The
rowers, like gondoliers, push them, walking forward on
a cleated wale which projects over the stern. The pas-
sage of the lime and cement boats across Hong-Kong's
harbor is a characteristic sight, ten to fifteen sweep
pushers on each side standing out yellow, naked and
brawny against the white-heaped cargo. The sails seen
in a treaty port are a curiosity. A Hakka never be-
lieves in mending until a thing is near ending, and this
applies also to his patient politics. The sails are half
holes, quarter matting, and the remaining quarter a
motley of American cotton flour bags, with the brands
favored by the local trade emblazoned : " Duck Lily,"
" Golden Pheasant," " Tiger Lady," " Twelve Pigs,*' etc.
While speaking of brands it will be interesting to re-
cite their favorites in the cotton piece trade : " Rat,"
"Sitting Tiger," "Heaven Girl," "Eighteen Sons,"
"Twelve Geishas," "Ox Plows in Field," etc. In
Kwangtung Province the fisher folk bring to the shore
in October an offering unto the sea of a pig and a sheep.
These, cooked, are set upon a table in the sands, and
prostrations are made by mandarin and bonze before a
paper effigy of a ship. The junks all have an orlop deck
in the high stern. Caulking is done with rattan, which
js cemented down with oil and gypsum. In them, you

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 139

behold the famous vessel which invented water-tight
compartments, centuries before the West adopted the
idea.

The foreigner of the treaty port is agreeably impressed
by the cordiality of their New Year holiday time, when
on every hand ring the words : " Knng Hai Fat Tsoy,"
(Congratulations; may you collect wealth). The com-
mencement of the New Year week may vary a month
between a period of years, as the festival begins with
the first new moon after the sun has entered Aquarius.
It therefore occurs in our January and February, and
is observed by at least a week of closed shop. It is the
only time of the year when the Chinese really close their
shops. In the ports, the greetings seldom go to the
extent of the kowtow, where the knees and forehead
touch the ground. This being a busy world, and be-
coming so even in China, the kung shao, or joining
the fists and raising them before the heart, while the
word "tsing" (hail) is repeated, are made to suffice.
The name of the New York state penitentiary, Sing
Sing, therefore means " Hail, Hail ! " literally, or idiom-
atically " Happy New Year," to a Chinese. Our Mott
and Doyers Street brethren of the Tong societies are
vastly amused, when they learn that their crimes are to
take them to such a felicitous gateway. Of lesser sig-
nificance are the Feast of Lanterns in February; the
Dragon Festival and Regatta in July; the Moon Fes-
tival in September, and the Winter Solstice in Novem-
ber. These feasts are the periods for financial settle-
ments.

Fighting of crickets is a favorite gambling game.
The little combatants are placed in straw cages, and
carried to the circular miniature ring. One is distin-

140 THE CHINESE

guished from the other by a painted white band across
the wings. Scorpions and lizards are also matched, and
bets are made whether the former will commit suicide by
stinging himself to death when he continually misses the
more alert lizard. Fires are built by the more brutal of
the jeunesse on the backs of tortoises, to incite them to
race, and cockroaches are made drunk so that bets may
be made which side of the ring the foolish insect will roll
over. Where there is a river praya, or court large
enough, the booth gamblers suddenly set up shop from
within their umbrellas, and a crowd immediately gathers,
just as a stone thrown in a stream collects foam in-
stantly. Often betting is going on around a fruit
wagon, to count the seeds of a coolie-orange. The skin
is not given to you when you purchase the fruit;
it is sold to the skin-candiers and the makers of fever-
tea. Until the government stopped the immigration,
Canton used to send to Hong-Kong ship-loads of
its prisoners and gamblers. The bare-shouldered
coolie, on his way from hoisting or sawing great teak
logs, or carrying coal in baskets, loves nothing better,
as a diversion, than to gather around a street fakir's
basket or a gambler's booth. He howls in glee when
the dissatisfied crowd turns the booth over, and the
lukongs, with their glistening enameled helmets bear-
ing the feathers of British law, swoop with padded
feet silently upon the melee; or the red-turbanned
Sikhs hear too great a commotion in a coolie boarding-
house on Elgin or Mosque Streets, and rush in to catch
the rascals red-handed at a game of pai-kau, or " Sap Ing
Wui." The runaways, with their padded shoes, think
nothing of jumping thirty-five feet to the ground.
There are many deaths however from contusion of the

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 141

brain, because the Celestial Icarus is unable to keep his
feet when he lands on them.

King of all their games, especially at that oriental
Monte Carlo, Macao, is fan-tan, where a large handful
of bright " cash " is taken from a heap at one end of the
table, and covered with a cup. This table is at the bottom
of a well. A two-story gallery rises above the table, and
the bets of those looking down are swung in a tiny bas-
ket to the cashier. Gamblers also sit around the table,
and closely watch the drawer. When the bets are all
placed on numbers one, two, three or four, or divided on
two numbers, the drawing begins by picking from the pile
under the cup, four cash at a time. What remains at the
last draw, wins. The Chinese seem able to tell, when
there are ten to thirteen cash undrawn, what number will
remain, and you hear the shouts of the winners becoming
clamorous : " Hi Yah, three wins, three wins." The
croupier takes out ten per cent, for the bank. The
winners never gain higher than eight to one. The bank
is never broken. Free cigars and tea are passed around
by attendants. The lanterns outside of the gambling
dens of Macao are the gaudiest the world over. One
may feel safe while in the vicinity of their light and the
lukong's whistle, but the way back to the hotel is a
threatening and dark one through streets as crooked as
an earthquake's edge. Chai Mui, is the betting game
of feasts, when the open ringers of the hand are thrust
against an opponent's in a gamble on the total. The
loser must empty a cup of hot samschu rice wine, their
humor lying in the effort to get every one drunk but
themselves. The roulette-like game of Po Tsz is pop-
ular among the Hakka tribes at Kowloon. Betting in
the temples on the Vi-seng, or examination lottery, has

i42 THE CHINESE

been prohibited by the government, that the dignity both
of religion and literature may be maintained. China is
so vast a body, in territory, in numbers and in history,
that it is hard to believe it is moving until surveys like
this are set upon various fixed marks in its social habits.
As Japan is running a Formosan lottery, and Portuguese
Macao, the famous religious one of the Casa Miseri-
cordia, so China has lately licensed drawings at Han-
kau, where the Russian tea colony is a large patron of
it.

Number three and its multiples are recognized as the
numerals of honor and good luck. The Emperor's
sacred mythical dragon, on which he rides in life and
death, has nine times nine scales. At the funeral of an
official, " nine times nine virtuous Buddhist priests "
offer up prayers for his absolution from punishment, and
for his purification. The great marble altar at Peking
for the worship of Shangtai, (Lord of Heaven, and
answering to our word God) is of three terraces,
each three times the size of the one above it. The top
terrace is three times thirty feet across, the slabs being
laid concentrically in multiples of nine, and the steps are
nine in each of the three series. Beside the white
marble altar rise three red poles which suspend the lan-
terns when the Emperor makes that most solemn wor-
ship, from a picturesque point of view, of all the earth's
kings, just before dawn, uncanopied save by the stars,
and mysteriously unwatched by the wide sleeping world.
There are " Three Manies " ; many years ; many joys ;
many sons, which it is enjoined may be engraved on
jade charms. Kowtows are done by threes. Pagodas
are of six or nine stories. The entrances of yamens and
temples are triple. Poets in adorning their rhyme, speak

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 143

of the " pagoda's lamps illumining the thirty-three
heavens." The shares of the Yuet-Han (Canton to
Han-kau) Railway are for three dollars. The Guild
of the Nine Hospitals of Canton is famous for its
charities and leadership in finance. Then in contradic-
tion, birthdays are celebrated on the odd number period ;
i. e., the thirty-first, the forty-first, etc.

The Chinese are very fond of using numbers as we use
rhymes, to remember related facts and names, as the " five
virtues " ; the " ten moral duties of men " ; the " ten trea-
sonable offenses" of the Ta Tsing Link Li (Book of
Laws); the "five metals"; the "five essences"; the
" three powers " ; the " five colors " ; the " eight immor-
tals " of the Taoists ; the " three bonds, of law, filial duty,
and marriage "; etc., etc. Although they employ allitera-
tion and rhyme, they prefer to express emphasis by
numbers. It is very common to observe even the most
stupid looking coolie, who has been reviewing boycott
caricatures, wake up, and warmly say to a clansman
who proposes going to the treaty port to ship as an
emigrant : " Ten thousand times I say it, don't go, they
will sell you like a pig." The Chinese day is divided
into twelve shins (two hours). These parts are not
known by numbers, but by poetic names. Their lineal
measure is the chih, equaling fourteen of our inches.
Their liquid measure, the tao, contains one and one-
tenth gallons, while the sheng contains nearly an English
quart. Distance is computed by the level lee, which is
one-third of a mile on the flat. One-sixth of a mile
up-hill is talked of as a lee, to express the ostensible
difficulty of the road. One cheung is fifteen feet.
Land is measured by the mao, or one-fifth of an
acre at Canton, and one-sixth at Peking. Their sys-

144 THE CHINESE

tern of weights is more familiar to the foreigner who is
compelled to use them at the treaty ports; viz., tael, one
and one-third ounces troy; catty, one and one-third
pounds avoirdupois; picul, one hundred thirty-three and
one-third pounds, and tan, two hundred forty pounds.
If your ship breaks the native merchant's flour bag or
box of abalone, he will bring to your perplexed, last im-
ported " griffin " clerk, the claim papers figured in cat-
ties, and leave him to reconcile the pounds of his mani-
fest.

All the cattle used in Hong-Kong and Manila come
from a little river port named Do-Shing, far above
Canton on the Sikiang River. The animal is small,
with buffalo characteristics as to hump, and is a near
relative of the wild anao of Celebes Island. The horns
are wide. The sight of lifting these animals from the
junks by the ship's hoist, attached to a gunny band about
their bellies, is a characteristic view of Hong-Kong's
unique harbor life, as strenuous as the West, although
under an X-ray tropical sun.

The water-buffaloes (shni-niu) of the rice tillers are
used to pull a wooden plow through the flooded
fields, to turn the loam around the roots of the trans-
planted rice. A threshing floor is rolled out on the
open earth, and men, animals and flails are used to beat
out the grain. When the animals are off duty they
wade out into the sea to escape the gnats which torture
their hairless hides. The droves of these animals which
wade into the bay off Kowloon Point is another of
Hong-Kong's interesting sights. They have vast
strength, and thick, almost circular horns. While docile
with the Chinese, to whom they are used, they viciously
and suddenly attack foreigners and horses, trusting to

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 145

one fell sweep of the horns to disembowel the victims.
The buffaloes are sometimes baited. The animal will
defend his muddy lair. The challenging beast is brought
up, when the defender rushes to the fray. The animals
are seldom goaded, and the fight is never to the death,
as the mild-blooded Chinese seem satisfied when one
animal turns tail.

To speak generally, man is the beast of burden in
China, although there is this notable exception : at
the salt wells of Szechuen and Shansi, one hundred
thousand water-buffaloes are used to work the primitive
pumping madiinery. In Korea one sees many black
bullocks. Not a Chinese city, except Peking and Tai
Yuan, has laid its streets wide enough for carts. The
founders expected that men always would be the carriers.
A stout bamboo is thrown across the shoulder, and if
a coolie has a pig to carry home at one end of it, he
balances it with some other household necessity, or at
least a pail of water which always comes in useful, — not
necessarily on the person, for before that luxury the fer-
tilizer pit is selected. The almost naked stevedores of
the treaty ports are magnificent fellows, the proudest
examples of a vegetarian diet the world over. If you
doubt their power, it is sufficient to watch them empty
a junk full of the immense India gunny bales. No
cranes are used. From the bottom of the hold, planks
are laid, and up these from tier to tier, the sure-footed,
bronze-colored coolies carry their monstrous loads, which
are suspended from a bamboo laid upon the bare, smok-
ing shoulders of ten men. Literally they are mighty
men of metal, for one seldom hears of a sore shoulder,
or complaints about the burden. The chanty song is
continually in use, and the possessor of the leading voice

146 THE CHINESE

gets more pay than the foreman. The Kowloon coolies
who drag teak lumber into piles, and those who saw it,
are even more famous for their longer falsetto chanties,
which are decidedly the most musical thing to our ear,
in the far East.

Where one would say the " roast beef of old Eng-
land," here it would be the " stewed hog of old China."
All eyes look upon him with a deep intent, even though
few can afford a piece of him. The golden bamboo is
woven about him, and he is laid, one on another, on a
two-wheeled cart which protrudes to great length before
and behind the axle. The load is arranged about to
balance itself. Ropes are attached for ten coolies to
pull, and ropes are stretched behind so that four coolies
may retard when the course is on one of the many de-
clivities of Hong-Kong. There are few steam whistles
even in the treaty ports, but, as always, Nature rushes
to fill the vacuum which she is said to hate! As soon
as the silent occupants feel their carriage moving, and
their pedometer-legs hit by the spokes, one unending
screech is set up in a falsetto truly Chinese, which
draws to each shop door along the route every grinning
foki. To make it more amusing, not a smile spreads
upon the dumb faces of the stalwart drawers whose
shoulders labor under the long cable. Then the shop-
men hoot at the procession. This is also the exact pro-
cedure when the courtezans, wearing their hair down
their backs as a sign, walk the street to advertise them-
selves. Every coolie jeers, spits and shouts " pig."
The Chinese attack shame with its most dreaded enemy,
derision. Devotees present pigs to the Buddhist shrine
of Honan, opposite Canton, and subscribe a fund to
feed the animals until natural death ensues, thus rescuing

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 147

what is doomed to death, which affords a merit mark in
their religious practices.

Who can juggle like a Chinese conjurer! There
he sits where the narrow streets widen into a stone
court; like a stone thrown into a stream, immediately
there is turmoil about him. He draws fire from his
mouth, or a snake from, your pocket, and all is accom-
panied by a falsetto jargon which makes you creep.
These conjurers also perform the miracle of the
mango tree. The mango fruit is planted in a spot which
the performer's wand touches. The circle gathers round,
and shortly a mango tree, forty feet high, is seen in
full bloom and fruit. As this appears slowly, and in-
distinctly at first, there is no doubt that it is the hyp-
notism in which his guild and the Thibetans excel, and
\vhich enables them so to influence their audience that
the performer seems to climb up a rope, vanish from
view in the sky, and when the spell is broken, he is first
seen on the outside of the circle. This work is all per-
formed while he incessantly talks and fixes his eye on
any recalcitrant subject.

The most sensational performance in the all-wonder-
ful East is the act entitled : " The Murder of the Child
Lo." I witnessed it on the mountain lawn of the Royal
Artillery mess at Hong-Kong. There was certainly no
subterranean passage. We hemmed in the performer.
First he proceeded with snake and other tricks, until
in the high quiet above the city, the attention of all was
riveted. Near him on the grass was an upturned empty
hamper. Seated at our feet was one stray Chinese child.
He called him ; seemed soon to quarrel with him ; —
some one said it was the conjurer's ward. His temper
rose as the child seemed to be obdurate. With a growl

i48 THE CHINESE

of a tiger he grasped the boy and threw the basket over
him. Holding it with one hand, he muttered solemnly;
he was swearing the clan vow of murder. Before we
realized it, he drew a sword, and thrust it again and
again through the basket, the most heartrending,
smothered cries beneath gradually dying to the death
whimper. From the sword seemed to drip blood. The
conjurer's mad eyes gleamed. He leaned on his
sword, as satisfied with his work as one possessed of a
fiend. In the awful silence, we looked from the terrace
to the heathen hills where rules the Abrahamic code that
a child always belongs to its parents, even for death if
so decreed. There was a general sigh, and a flutter like
leaves as he released us from the spell of hypnotism.
Returning reason made us try to reach him, to avenge
the brutality. He anticipated this; he kicked the basket
over. There was nothing beneath it. A terrible silence
settled down and held our hands. We looked at one an-
other, all believing that this was a magician, instead of a
rascal, like unto whom there was never an equal. The
child had vanished like air, and the dry wicker was as
empty as it first had been when we gathered round it
on the lawn. The magician had no assistants among
us. Suddenly the child, with a cry of joy, burst from
our midst into the arms of the wonder-weaver. We
had seen the most famous act of legerdemain in the
world, and understanding it not, but having experienced
it, declare it to have been hypnotism.

Off the banks of the many canals little basins have
been cut, which latter are private property, though the
government furnishes the canal water free. There are
one hundred cases in the Yamen courts on water rights
to one of any other cause. The basins are fenced off

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 149

with bamboo lattices sunk to the bottom, and are used
for duck and fish pools, and lily-root farms. Species of
lily are highly esteemed articles of food; the roots are
also candied as bon-bons for the ladies. The stems are
used in medicine, and the leaves for packing, or for
adobe plastering. Nothing of nature's productions
escapes the grasp of the utilitarian Chinese, except the
fragrance of the flowers.

The Imperial color is red, and to impress the Colonial
Chinese with a sense of royalty, foreign governors, as
at Hong-Kong, Macao and Saigon, have uniformed
their chair bearers and 'rickisha runners in this color.
The calling card is red, to signify joy within the bounds
of dignity. Sometimes a mandarin will paper a room
with these cards, to show his popularity with callers.
Throughout Kwangtung Province, both Hakka and Pun-
tei women affect black or mottled headgear, with white
and pink robes, but in Szechuen white headgear with
blue robes are almost universal.

If you own a godown (warehouse) on the waterfront,
and appoint a native godownman to live on the premises,
you will be surprised if you visit your property after
working hours. The cargo junks, with their loads of
gunnies, have sailed, and the gangs of laborers have gone.
A dozen karojels, or dip nets stretched on bamboos, are
in operation from the Praya wall, and your godownman,
in a new role, is walking behind the operators taking his
toll of fish from each as his cumshaw (commission).
When the net is dropped, bread and bait are thrown into
it. The fish swim over the net, which at first is raised
very gently, and at last with a rush. The catch some-
times consists of the green and gold, mosquito-larvae de-
vouring, Athorinides minnows, which are destined to

150 THE CHINESE

play a wonderful part in cleansing the Orient of its
dreaded curse, malaria.

All Chinese music is weird and screeching. They say
their pleasure comes in exciting, not in soothing the
nerves. They have flutes, horns, violins, peipas (gui-
tars), shcngs (mouth organ with thirteen reeds), and
table harps to be played with a loaded feather, which last
make delightful music akin to our mandolins. Every
business hong has its musical corps (just as we organize
company baseball clubs), who, in the evening, are sup-
posed to amuse the typan (master), who lives on the
story above the comprador's apartment. Seated on the
counters, which at night are also their beds, the fokis
essay with a vengeance discords which are unquestionably
disturbing to occidental nerves, but for that reason the
phlegmatic Chinese find them exhilarating. It suggests
to them untamed passion, and all the savage things their
race could do if they willed, and which they have not
tried since Hung Siu Tsuen started to march from his
Kwangtung village to Nanking, with stops by the way
which are ensanguined for ever in history.

Stoutness is rare, but is considered honorable in a man
and beautiful in a woman. The most noticeable thing
on entering the Flowery Forest Monastery at Canton is
that the statues of the five hundred disciples of Buddha
were given to corpulency, and the god himself has a line
like the equator.

At the time of an eclipse, the villagers deploy into the
open with drums and every other instrument that will
stand pounding, and make an incessant noise which is
intended to frighten the earth dragon from eating up the
celestial man in the sun. It is very important to frighten
the dragon back to his lair, because his quiescence means

Best taste in dress. A small-footed woman of South China.

A Club for wealthy Chinese ; members watching a play. Teakwood

tables with tops of marble from Yunnan province ;

water-pipes ; teacups ; fans.

Mothers of rulers of China. A group of Manchu women at Peking,

North China. Note peculiar hair-dressing; long one-piece

tunics, unbound feet and high wooden shoes.

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 151

peace on earth and prosperity for the individual. The
Li Pu (Board of Rites) considers the " Saving of the
Sun or Moon " a matter of sufficient moment to occasion
an Imperial decree. Now, whether this is holiday-
making, humor, paternalism, or superstition, is open for
choice. My own observation, taken even among the very
ignorant, supports the belief that there is not so much of
the last named in the occurrence as to warrant our utter
despisal of the proceedings.

Some of us, when the old monarchic past of our Euro-
pean forefathers haunts us, boast of our Norse and Nor-
man, our Mayflower, or other descent, but members
of the simple Hakka tribes, who live opposite Hong-
Kong, keep with care and can recite veritable trees that
root back infinitely previous to our oldest families, and
when you look at a Hakka woman, with her quaint hand-
kerchief, instead of the otherwise universal bamboo hat
over her head, you have a feeling that she is unchanged
from the woman, who, from a higher peak, saw Noah
disembark !

Though they have hookah water-pipes, the most popu-
lar form is chibouk-shaped, with very small cups, which
only hold .enough tobacco for a few puffs. Matches are
not in general use. The smoker puts the bowl of his pipe
directly into the smoky nut-oil lamp that is for ever burn-
ing on deck, counter and before the family tablets. The
best tobacco is grown on the uplands of Szechuen. It
is of a mild quality. Kwangtung is developing its acre-
age, as Chinese, versed in the more expert culture and
curing in Manila, return to their native land.

The word home in the Chinese ideograph ~j>, repre-
sents literally a place where a full dressed man may
kneel to his ancestral tablets under his own roof. The

152 THE CHINESE

native house is generally of one story, built around an
open court (yuan), and which is also called by the
fancy name of Tien Ching (heavenly well), because
the stars look into its pool, where the owner has placed
the gold and silver fish from Lake Tsau. In making
an arch, an adobe support is first built up. In country
places, walls are built higher than the roof so as to
serve as a parapet when the owner protects his home
from pirates. You will notice at every door that the red
Mun Pai (census) tablet is pasted up to conform with
the law, and in the kitchen a red slip is pasted calling for
blessings from the god of homes, Tsao. Indeed, a man-
darin's red Yamen, with its placards, looks like an over-
grown valise back from a Cook's tour of continental
hotels. Cats are more tolerated than loved, the natives
calling them the despised name of Kia Li (house fox).
The most expensive breed is from Yunnan, and is tail-
less.

Shrubs and chrysanthemums are dwarfed and pruned
into freakish shapes, sometimes like gowned humans,
with porcelain heads and hands stuck upon the
extended branches. The effect is pleasing and unique.
Greater luxury of bloom could not be developed than
their royal lotus and peony. Azaleas, oleanders, jasmine,
camellia, tuberoses, and orange are abundant in season.
In the moist climate the scent of the flowers is cloying,
some foreigners in their ennui calling it " the eternal
funeral of the south." The natives excel in several
branches of horticulture, attacking the various destructive
scales of fruit trees with parasites which die as soon as
the pest which they live on is dried up. Parasites to at-
tack our purple, red, and Florida scales have recently
been imported into California from China. At night,

•INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 153

lanterns are hung in the garden to delight the eye of the
master and guest. In the adobe houses of Kansu and
Pechili, niches are cut in the solid wall to hold the porce-
lain or metal lamp, which merely consists of a wick
hanging from the bean- or nut-oil in the basin. The two
rooms are bare of cupboards. A bar where clothes may
be hung, stretches across one end. A long shelf near the
ceiling holds utensils, -vegetables, etc., while great jars
(kongs) hold various pickles and soys. Outdoors, small
low tables are set beneath mats spread on poles to afford
shade, and in contrast with Japan you notice the use of
chairs made of bamboo.

In a rich man's house, there is a chapel or room for the
ancestral tablets, for a Chinese father is both patriarch
and priest. There are no idols in the home, and from
their domestic life you do not feel that you are indeed
among the heathen. You are really won to the sim-
plicity and honesty of their ancestor-anniversaries and
remembrance, for we Occidentals do a little bit of this
kind of worship ourselves when we have a general in
the alliance or a Covenanter in the blood. Though this
is the home of silks, none of the furniture has hangings
or upholstery to hold dust. Everything is smooth, cool
and cleanly. 'A bat is worked in the panel of the frieze,
between the rooms, to signify Sho (long life). Cook-
ing is done outside the house, either in the open under
a lean-to, or in a separate building attached to the coolie
quarters in the compound. The Shanghai bath, so called
by foreigners because they first used it there, but really
made at Nanking or Kau-chow, compels the sitter to
double up like a jack-knife. It is of brown or yellow
porcelain. The stopper is a cork set into a hole placed
in the edge of the bottom.

154 THE CHINESE

When the weather is cold, brasiers or hand flues are
brought in, and in the north a permanent brick or adobe
flue (called a kang) is built half beneath and half above
the first floor. On this the members of the family sleep
with wooden pillows under their necks. If the cover is
short, it is pulled over the shaven head and not the inured
feet. At Hong-Kong, which was comparatively chilly in
February for us who were enervated by the awful south,
when we had occasion to go back to our offices at night to
despatch a ship at daylight, it was amusing to apprehend
a dozen of our coolies, and their friends called in from the
open highways, sleeping upon our desks and counters in
this morgue-like fashion. There is need for the kang in
the northern provinces, and even as far south as Hupeh,
three inches of snow will lie on the ground. In the
larger inns a special room, curtained off, is reserved for
the kangs. There is an aisle in the center, toward which
the sleepers place their heads. Oiled paper is used to
facilitate the entrance of some light. Reeds, castor-oil
plants, and matting are squeezed into the walls to hold the
exceedingly poor plaster. The floor and outside covering
are generally adobe. The kang, which is frequently fed
and drawn from out of doors, is used mostly in Man-
churia, Pechili and Shansi. South of Chili, the people
depend more on brasiers and clothes, although at Ningpo
the thermometer drops as low as twenty-four degrees. At
Hong-Kong, it was known only once to go to thirty-two
on the Peak, but the rawness of winter in the south is as
uncomfortable as colder weather in the drier north. The
southern Chinese have no word for snow. The Kwang-
tung emigrant, who is the man we have in America,
writing home, calls it " sky cotton." As we use a hot-
water bag, a Chinese uses his charcoal stove, inserting

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 155

it in his pu-kai (mattress), under his vest, or up his
sleeve, as need may be for temporary warmth. Like the
Russian, the Chinese peasant, though sleeping, can sniff
asphyxiation within an inch and yet save himself.
Abundant as coal is in Shansi and the north, the dust is
utilized by being worked into balls with clay and camel's
dung, and used as fuel briquettes in the small hand-
cooking stoves which are made at Han-kau. In contrast,
consider our waste of sawdust and coal-dust.

The Chinese sojourner at an inn exercises his humorous
propensity. You will always see scribbling on the walls,
and the subjects generally are: " Guess as to the weight
in catties of the rats in this house ;" " Enter your name
here for the competition as to which guest has risen with
the most flea or bug bites." The roofs in Kiang-si and
the two Kwang Provinces are made of tiles, but in Hupeh
reeds are used for a more picturesque thatch. Mural
decoration is done by the use of wood or inlaid tiles.
Scroll and screen work are abundantly employed. The
Chinese love privacy. The first indication of growing
wealth, is to add another foot to the compound wall,
rather than an addition to the home itself. A son meet-
ing his father, kowtows to him three times three, with his
fists closed together. The superiority of their filial de-
votion, they attribute to the great superiority of their
literature for children. The word must is even more em-
phatic than in the discipline of a Covenanter, or a Crom-
wellian Ironside. When about to depart on a journey,
the lord of the house stands in the midst of his family on
his threshold, and looks back. A cup of tea is handed
him by his tin-fong (second wife), if he has one, or by
his wife in her humility as servant to her lord, who is act-
ing as priest. He raises the cup as a salute to Tsao, the

156 THE CHINESE

god of home, and a prayer for return. He drinks it as an
obeisance to god Tien of the heavens, if he wills that he
shall never come back, according to that perfect Con-
fucian Golden Rule : " Perform each act and use each
day as though they were thy last." If it is a guest who
is leaving, the host does not say " good-by," but " ho-
hang" (go slow), which is a little commentary on the
condition of their roads. Instead of building a proper
foundation for the road, the stone blocks are fastened
with iron clamps. With the action of rain, or frost,
what was meant for a road becomes often a veritable
cheval-de-frise !

Rich merchants frequently leave provision in their
wills for a monumental gate, bridge, inn or theater, to
be erected in their memory, the guild being trustee.
All these works are considered to draw trade and travel
to one's native town. The Chinese figure of speech
expresses the significant fact that their home-maker, and
not the bachelor lodger, dignifies the urban popula-
tion, and composes the beauty and safety of their
society. You do not ask : " How many people in this
city ? " but " How many kitchens within these honorable
walls? " Upon entering the house, you do not elect where
you shall sit, but advance to the great hall. At the left
of the teak guest table, which is against the wall under
the longest Confucian motto, you take your place as of
right, — the host sitting on the right, since we are re-
versed in all things. There are chairs down the hall on
the left and right, where you gradually ascend or descend,
according to the rank of the departing or arriving guests.
Thin mother-of-pearl shells are set in wooden frames,
and used for the windows of the saloon of the mandarin's
house-boat, and for the windows of the better class of

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 157

houses, the hinge of the window being at the top and the
prop at the bottom. The glaring sun is softened won-
derfully, and the heat is tempered somewhat. Marble
and even granite are cut in slabs, and set in the seats of
their black-wood chairs, not only for ornament, but for
coolness. At the same time that the foundation of the
home is being dug, a spot is selected where to dig in the
center of the court, before the women's hong, a lakelet for
the goldfish.

Outside Tsianfu, the capital of Shensi Province, is a
bluff of cliff dwellings where Tartar families live, and
which they fortified against the last Mohammedan rebel-
lion. It was not preference but safety which chose the
location, which may throw light upon the raison d'etre
for scattered cliff dwellings, whether in Africa or New
Mexico. In the great drought famine of 1901, when the
treacherous Hoang-ho dried up like a bone, three hun-
dred thousand starving Shensi people came up to the
provincial capital, and on being refused admittance to
the overcrowded city, they dug with their hands caves in
the loess cliffs, so that their emaciated bodies might lie
out of the way of the feet of men and camels. Let us
admit the analogy, — cats, dogs, and even human bodies
were as scarce in the streets of Tsian Fu as they were
in the streets of La Rochelle in 1628, and the obvious
reason shows again how men are all akin under any color
of skin when the same kind of trouble meets them. The
red banks of the Min near the capital of Szechuen, and
down the river as far as Sui Fu, also show cliff dwellings.
The valley of the Chu Lung River in Pechili Province
exhibits similar dwellings, set as irregularly in the cliff
as swifts' nests.

Doors are not made to open on hinges but along

158 THE CHINESE

grooves. Into the farthest nooks of China, our clocks,
called " iron crickets," have gone. They do not attempt
to regulate them, for the sun only is relied on for time.
Our clock is appreciated as a toy, for the sake of the
revolution of the hands, the ticking like an insect's, and
particularly the bells, whose striking apparatus they call
the " Melican lark."

In the south, bars are set perpendicularly in sockets,
instead of a door being used on the street, and the htkong
on patrol is afforded a view of the inside of the closed
shop. The windows, however, are closed with shutters.
These door bars are often beautifully lacquered and gilt.
This use of bars, set farther apart, however, is conspicu-
ous at the great prisons, such as at Canton's Yamen,
where the prisoners in cangues look like so many zoo in-
habitants on exhibition in their various kinds of torture.
The purpose is to admit air, or there would be no prison-
ers for the coming Assizes in so hot a country. Flat locks
are not manufactured. The Chinese lock is a brass pad-
lock, long, narrow, and with the keyhole in the end.
When shut, it looks like a miniature ark. It snaps with-
out the use of a key. The long key which pushes the
spring out, is either our double " L," or letter " E." The
security of the lock depends on the length of the key, a
three-inch insertion being necessary before the springs
of the smallest locks can be reached. The lock is never
cast, but is made of seven pieces, carefully joined by in-
terlocking, sweating and solder. A collection of these
locks is worth while, for the sake of the artistic brass
hammering. The key is a cumbersome affair. It sets
into its case like a jack-knife. Each key has a ring.
When a foki, having locked his master's camphor-wood
boxes, door-bars, and window shutters, wends his way

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 159

homeward, he is undeniably a literal illustration of the
Paulist man of " sounding brass and tinkling cymbal,"
but from his excellent accord with his neighbors, and his
long patience in family matters, I have no doubt he
eminently possesses (heathen though he is) that charity
which was in the same scriptural verse recommended to
the Corinthians instead of metal.

The Chinese taste in spectacles demands a wide tortoise
rim around the glasses, and for the ear bridges, so that
your distinguished and learned friend is a perpetual
caricature of a walking chauffeur.

Social letters are marked on the envelope with a char-
acter indicating whether the news is of social felicitation,
business fortune or condolence, so that the recipient is
immediately prepared. In Thibet the custom is more
elaborate, silk ribbon being attached to the missives to
indicate both the message and the rank of the sender.
Between regular correspondents a motto, mutually under-
stood, is affixed instead of the name, a significant com-
mentary on the courier and postal service. Your Chinese
merchant is a born conservative.

It is considered social and business manners never to
refuse a request directly, but to give a conciliatory reply,
and the following day to send an excuse that something
untoward connected with the gods, or one's relatives,
prevents a compliance. Occidentals call this lying, but it
is the national code of politeness which has fostered the
custom which they call : " respectfully saving your face."
They \vould never think of asking you to pay a debt in
set language, but rather for a " return loan." The man-
ners of the servants constantly lead them to be misunder-
stood. A coolie never resigns your service; he asks for
leave to visit his father's grave. It would be impolite to

160 THE CHINESE

tell you direct that he was leaving. He sends you a sub-
stitute without your asking him to do so, which means,
if you understood him, that he has secured better em-
ployment, and that he has a cousin to whom he wishes
you to teach English.

As the elephant is sacred in Siam, the tortoise is sacred
in China, but it has never secured the popularity of the
mythical beasts, the four-clawed dragon and the grotesque
lion, which one sees sculptured in stone at every temple
stairway throughout China and Korea. The blue spot
on the Imperial standard set just before the ravenous
teeth of the dragon is the famous mythical pearl which
he is said to be always striving after, but never secures.
This is not meant to convey the futility of empire, but
rather our idea of " Exsertens, perpetua." In the lan-
tern procession a round transparency, to represent the
same idea, is carried in front of the wriggling beast,
which manceuvers on human legs.

Curiously like the Mosaic and Romaic customs, the
fixed laws of China are carved on stone and set up in the
streets. Chinese criminal law, which is founded on the
" Chau Kung," or Ritual of Chau, is based upon the ac-
cused confessing, and no punishment can ensue until
this is brought about, — all so far removed from the hu-
maner English law, where even the Bench advises that
the prisoner need say nothing to incriminate himself, and
the action of our juries in throwing out of court confes-
sions obtained by private detective agencies, working for
" secret " rewards, through starving and " sweating " the
prisoner. Until the late courageous reforms of Wu Ting
Fang, torturing was resorted to in all cases before much
trouble was taken to collect evidence, and naturally a
starved and persecuted victim confessed to anything.

Before the condemned are decapitated, they are offered
all the samischu they desire to drink, and in most cases
they are allowed to choose whether they will ride in a
'rickisha or be carried in a sedan.

No spot of the earth has drunk so deeply of the blood
of criminals as the execution court near the Yamen at
Canton. It is only a blind alley, not much larger than the
back yard of one of our tenements. In the Taeping rebel-
lion, the government beheaded fifty thousand men here.
It is stone-paved and sand-strewn. Piled against the
walls are immense stone jars, which are reserved to hold
the pieces of the bodies of the next dozen victims who are
lincheed into a thousand pieces. There are also bamboo
baskets, in which will be carried away the heads of exe-
cuted pirates, to be stuck on poles, and exhibited in the
districts where they were a curse. The shade of Robes-
pierre would bloom here as a violet in comparison with
the ghostly flower of this human shambles. At Pe-
king the execution ground is merely a part of the
public highway, in the southwest section, near the palace
chrysanthemum gardens, which is blocked off by soldiers
for the gruesome occasion, and is afterward immediately
given back to the passing of travel. When Vah Kah
Der, the notorious outlaw, was executed at Soochow on
October I5th, 1906, the new foreign drilled soldiers filed
on the parade ground, and took position with true occi-
dental precision around a ring. Then, moving slowly be-
cause of the robes worn, came a procession of high offi-
cials, who seated themselves on chairs within the circle,
the leading officials taking places at a long table under a
tent. A deep gong sounded from the Yamen building.
At the double quick, a company of Chinese braves or
viceroy's retainers, was seen advancing, and in the

162 THE CHINESE

midst was the chained criminal, carried high upon a
wicker tray, and with flags pinned to his new tunic, which
the State provides for such occasions, denoting the mur-
ders he was found guilty of. The circle opened, and he
was cast to the ground in a heap, his neck pulled forward
by the queue, and all was over apparently with unseemly
haste. The short, thick sword, Tai Fo, is first heated
in water, before the single stroke is given. Political ex-
ecutions in Korea as late as 1882, were performed by
bullocks tearing the victims asunder.

Oaths are of three kinds, the most solemn being to go
out in the open air and kowtow to the skies of god
(Tien), and to the earth, when the blood of a white horse
and a black ox (Fan Niu) are spilled from cups, as a
libation to god and to creation's telluric principle respect-
ively. Outside some of the villages, in a clearing in a
grove, a low, wide stone altar is built for this ceremony.
The other oaths are breaking a jar, which is a vow by the
earth, our mother; and chopping off a cock's head, which
is swearing by the blood of life. This last is permitted
by the English law courts of Hong-Kong and Singapore.
The shedding of a cock's blood is sometimes used to sol-
emnize a curse. In Hupeh Province a cock whose throat
has just been cut is dashed against the bow of a vessel go-
ing down the ways at a launching. In the service of the
secret societies a white cock is killed and the following
execration repeated : " May the unfaithful and disloyal
perish like this cock." An amusing answer was made in
Pidgin-English in the Hong-Kong courts where a Chinese
was asked concerning his preference for the Chinese or
English method of taking the oath : " Oh, allee samee my,
kill 'im cockee ; break 'im jugee ; smell 'im bookee ! " The
oaths of secret societies are in addition written and then

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 163

burned before the god's image, that he may in the spirit
world punish perjurers. The most solemn altar is that
of the Temple of Heaven at Peking, which is dearer to
the Chinese because of its many ravagings by foreigners.
Here the High Priest, the Emperor, bows before the
High God, or " Shang Ti." At the foot of the altar are
iron censers, in which are burned the names of all ex-
ecuted criminals, as a witness that the law of Heaven has
been enforced on earth.

China's hope of abolishing the usurpation of her courts
by foreign consuls and judges in extra-territoriality re-
gimes, depends entirely upon the success of Wu Ting
Fang and his successors in their enthusiastic work to
bring the country's code (Pai Yang Kuan), and the new
Fah Pu (Justice Board) to approach nearer to occidental
practices. In this work Wu was assisted by the advice
of Professor Magozo, D. C. L., of Tokio University.
The code now in use, and older than Solomon, is not
lacking in statutes. If anything, the laws are too severe.
In the aim to deter crime the Justinians of China over-
stepped themselves by making the punishments so severe
that the mandarins, fearing the local fuyins (people's
mayors), and the populace, do not dare to apply them.
What is wanted in most cases is a less severe punishment,
but its unfailing application. It was the severity of the
laws of Leviticus which nullified their application. The
following peculiar punishment was inflicted at the assizes
of Chantseun in Kwangtung in September, 1907. A
military official who had blackmailed a boat captain, was
compelled to wear for three days in full view of his fellow
officers an arrow which had been run through his ear.
Afterward he was committed to jail for ten years, in the
laudable endeavor to drive injustice from the rivers, and

164 THE CHINESE

gain maritime Hong-Kong's approval, for she is rapid to
complain and pull diplomatic turmoil around the ears of
Peking. The mob has been known to resent an unpopu-
lar decision by rushing upon the magistrate and pulling
off his long boots, or placing his official chair on the top
of a bonfire, as a dare for him to resent it. The old
code covers fourteen thousand incidents and precedents
in the following divisions: Criminal; Sumptuary; De-
fense; Military; Public Works; Ceremonial; Judicial;
Religious; Fiscal and Family. It is proposed to sepa-
rate the civil and criminal procedures. The changes in
mandarins are so frequent that the law is really in-
terpreted by a local hanger-on of the court, who is not
in the Civil Service, and who receives fees from both
judge and criminal. Here is the bed of the bribery sys-
tem. Judges should serve longer. District attorneys
should be appointed by the municipalities and barristers
should be registered. Juries should be instituted.

The most serious crime in the old code is that of
striking a parent, the punishment for which is Ling-
chih (cutting into one thousand pieces), but then the
Semitic law (Exodus 21; 17) prescribed death as the
penalty for cursing a parent. Ling-chih is practised
throughout the stern south. In November, 1907, two
women were thus cut to death at Swatow, and it is a
weekly occurrence at Canton. The lightest punishment
is wearing the cangue all day, while being starved. This
wooden collar weighs twenty-six pounds, and soon throws
the victim head downward, where he lies as a prostrated,
exhausted wretch. When we inveigh against the many
causes for beheading in the Chinese criminal code, we
should reflect that no longer ago than Tudor times, Lon-
don Bridge not infrequently had two hundred heads ex-

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 165

posed at one time on its piers. Wu fought to introduce
trial by jury in capital cases, and the Hong-Kong British
jury of seven is exerting a powerful example in the mat-
ter. From juries to parliaments and parties, the steps
are short, and then shall not men wonder if Liberty has
any more fields to conquer, but let us not worry. Liberty
is a thing that rusts, and it is nearly as hard to keep the
pan clean as to buy a new one. If China gets juries, she
will in this excel Japan's judicial system, for Japan has
none. We can not altogether disbelieve in China when
we consider that in the long run that government which
does wrong, falls, and History never raised her voice with
such approval as in this case. The fat old days of official
corruption when a viceroy like Li Hung Chang, clothed
like a beggar to deceive the assessors, could die worth
a billion, and when mandarins would steal the soldiers'
grain to the last tao, and then burn the granary down to
obliterate trace of the loss, are departing, never to dawn
in China again in such lurid shame. In the draft of the
new laws, it is prohibited for newspapers to recount crime
at length, as sensationalism is believed to inflame more
crime.

It is not likely that China will yet abolish capital
punishment for the purloining of fiduciary funds or for
bribery. It is also probable that the court eunuchs at
Peking will be dismissed. The intriguing of these effemi-
nates has always been dangerous to crown and ministers.
A native wit advises : " Keep your spirit out of hell,
and your face out of court." The people hate lawyers
as they now know them. They have many a sobriquet
and witticism concerning their calling : " Rats under
the Bench;" " Cash drops into a lawyer's paw as a sheep
falls into a tiger's claw ;" " Those who, when they pluck

1 66 THE CHINESE

the bird's feathers, take the skin too," etc., etc. It is
among this class that China's poverty and misery have
groveled. Ever too poor, with her low taxation, to equip
her courts with lictors, clerks, marshals and pleaders,
the hangers-on offered to do the work for the privilege
of settling the fee privately. They have been the tax
gatherers. Has this privilege corrupted them and better
than they ? What did more to corrupt the great Equites
class of the Roman Republic than this opportunity for
extortion ? A State can not shirk to class its responsibil-
ities, and at the same time be sure of delegating its
honor. The result has been " squeeze," blackmail and
bribery, and the mandarin, in the poverty of his equip-
ment, has been forced to be satisfied with enunciating
the law, — not enforcing it.

The notoriety about offices being purchased does not
apply to China's civil service. The tax gatherers and
unlicensed counsel would prefer their own purchased
opportunities, to the salary of a mandarin. When their
purse is low, these pettifoggers hire rascals to charge
their fellows with crime and contempt, and see to it that
the mill of shame has grist come to it from the black-
mail of their fetid imagination. It is these so-called
lawyers who have blindfolded Justice in Kwangtung in
her search for pirates, and therefore America and Europe
have an interest in encouraging China to clean up the
Augean stables of her courts. From ten thousand
villages where the barns and tax receipts are burned by
these rascals; from the bleached bones in the mountain
passes of those who were decoyed and murdered to
obtain the rewards offered by rich brutes who laughed
at the law of their country; from ten thousand liti-
gants whose cases have never reached the judge but

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 167

been bandied from one lawyer to another; from thou-
sands of daughters, kidnapped by these lictors to keep
strife and sorrow active; from the relatives of the
murdered, and the ravaged homes of the plundered every-
where in the patient land, swells the plea that the courts
be equipped, even at increased taxes, and that the lawyers'
clique of extortion be extirpated for ever in a vitalized
patriotism among their successors. A similar condition
of lawyers studying the law's evasion for the fattening
of certain money-changers existed in Palestine in the
time of Christ. Success then to Wu and his successors
in their radiant-hued reforms in judicial ethics.

Yung Ching writes : " Happy are we when the judge
can sleep undisturbed in the court, and when the villager's
door is no longer pecked at night, as by a hungry hawk,
by the collector of double taxes. What joy is equal to
that of seeing the backs of blackmailing lawyers and lic-
tors passing through your outer compound? Litigation
is suing a flea and getting a bite for justice." What could
better prove that the hearts of this people are attuned to
trust law, than the following? In October, 1907, a white
explorer, one Deminil, killed a Chinese soldier who was
resisting his entrance without passports into Thibet at
Batang. The mob, even in this wild country of the
Kincha Valley, where they will probably never hear that
justice has been meted out, suffered the prisoner to be
taken by the military mandarin two thousand miles away,
to stand trial in the extra-territorial American court at
Shanghai. If we admit that the Chinese people are the
poorest the world has known; that they have borne that
poverty the longest with perfect philosophy and orderli-
ness, and not out of ignorance or dullness; that they
never neglect the old and are charitable even to giving

1 68 THE CHINESE

their all repeatedly in their lives, yet never rebelling
against the barbed confines of an inexorable duty which
is sterner and wider than the Greek's idea of the virtue,
we must admit they are the grandest race the Creator
looks on, and that it is a greater spectacle than a man
rising from poverty to affluence in a land of greater op-
portunity, such as ours. It is what we bear, not what
we win, which is greatness.

In the government of the four hundred clans, and the
village and district life, the elders over sixty years of age,
and the graduates (of whatever age) of the literary ex-
aminations, form one council or Shan-sze, under a fnyin
(mayor), or tepao (dean) of their own, and China in
this way has been under democratic rule from time im-
memorial, for the mandarin seldom interjects his author-
ity. These elders are to be addressed as laoye (sir),
which is the respect paid a low judge. The piko of
the kindred Mongolians takes charge of the clan councils
with the power of a chief, though in his case, confirmation
must be obtained from the " Board of Colonies and Cen-
sure " at Peking. The government tax is paid, and the
land is divided up among the highest bidders, by the
council. Taxes are evaded, especially by mandarins, by
a concealment of wealth. Li Hung Chang was notorious
for this lack of patriotism. Said one of his kind:
" Would the otter have been killed if he had not shown
his rich hide?" The Shui-li (land tax), which is now
five cents a mao (six mao an acre), the government hopes
to raise to eight cents, in conformity with a plan sub-
mitted by Robert Hart, lately their adviser. In com-
parison, the Japanese tax on poorer land is at present
fifteen cents a mao. We need say no more to reveal the
potentiality of dormant China. When drought visits the

Chinese bridge at Soochow, Kiang-su province. East China. Wash-
women and houseboats.

Chinese justice for theft of fiduciary funds, bribery, etc.: Criminals
suspended by chins in bottomless cages, until dead. Out-
side Viceroy's Yamen, Canton, South China.

A funeral procession with honorary banners, passing a forage cart

on the street which runs inside the outer wall, Peking,

North China. The dark vault of the gate through the

wall can be slightly seen on the extreme left of

the picture. A soldier of China's modern

army is at the right of the picture.

INCIDENTS OF DAILY LIFE 169

land, oftentimes the peasants carry their plowshares to
the plaza in front of the yamen, and cast them in a heap
as a mute intimation to the mandarin that it would be
inhuman to levy the land tax, when the share, sowing
and sweat have brought no harvest. The land tax in
Szechuen Province, by an ancient agreement at the time
of its repeopling, is the lowest in China, and the province
is the most populous and richest, which is a glorious
illustration of the wisdom of not taxing necessities, but
rather reaching out after luxuries to support government.
Family disputes, debts, wayward youths, village works,
wells, lawsuits (most of them on water rights), celebra-
tions, processions, and the clan's policy toward other
clans, and the government as represented in the manda-
rin, Taotai and viceroy, — are all controlled by the coun-
cil. Six clans send all the emigrants to America. Their
names are Sam Yup; Yung Wo; Hop Wo; Yan Wo;
Kong Chow, and Ning Yung, known to us as the fa-
mous " Six Companies " of San Francisco.

Speaking generally, emigration from the village to the
city is discouraged. It is the family pride that the sons',
and the sons' sons' houses are all within the parent com-
pound. A popular story which the 'rickisha coolies chant
from their pamphlets, while they wait for their masters, is
about " Chang Kung and his nine generations all within
one wall." China has yearned over its children like
Isaac. She has loathed the emigration barracoons of
Macao, and the blue-funneled coolie ships lying off the
Prayas of Swatow and Hong-Kong. An exception is the
emigration to Mongolia, where all taxes are remitted
for five years to Chinese, the government considering this
the most effective way to restrain the vexatious and un-
certain Mohammedans, and the troublesome Mongols

i/o THE CHINESE

who have acquired their wayward habits. The clan po-
lices its fields from the depredations of Hakka and Miao-
tse vagrants. You will notice warnings pasted on the
sides of shrines and on bulletin boards. Some of them
warn you not to fill in a disused well, as that would be
unlucky. The clan law or custom prescribes certain
gleanings of grain and cotton which must be left by the
reapers. The stubble of sorghum must not be cut below
a certain height. Rice is caught in the hand and cut by
the sickle half-way down the stalk, while in the northern
provinces the whole straw of the millet is left standing,
the ears only being cut out. A gong is rung from the
temple porch to announce that the clan fields are open to
the gleaning of the poor on the day following. Tres-
passers convicted by the council are consigned to the
cangue for various periods during harvest time, and as
they are generally the poor and opium degenerates, the
punishment of being incarcerated during gleaning days
is a severe one.

In the more complex life of the capital or Fu cities,
and the smaller cities of Ting and Chau ranks, of course
Governors General (Tsung Tuh) and Lieutenant Gov-
ernors (Liang Kiang) rule. Altogether the organiza-
tion of departments, districts, provinces, cities, towns,
villages and circuits is thorough and admirable. The lit-
eral translation of chichau (district mandarin) is " know-
er of his district," indicating the sympathy expected
between ruler and ruled, from the Tsung Tuh down to
the lowest official, the siunkien (justice of the peace). A
relic of barbaric clan life exists in the Yeung Kong dis-
trict of Kwangtung. On the fifth day of the fifth moon,
the men of two villages meet in a valley and line up on
each side of a stream for an all-day battle with stones and

slings. The battle is witnessed by visitors from sur-
rounding villages. As men are struck or injured, they
are carried or ruled off the field. Sometimes one thou-
sand men are engaged and deaths are occasional, though
not more die than if one thousand men played football.
Similar stone-throwing contests, set for stated times and
the settling of accumulated clan feeling, are not uncom-
mon in Korea. At Seoul, different wards of the city, and
in Yunnan, some of the Shan tribes engage in these
fights.

The paths outside of the treaty ports are too narrow for
even the 'rickisha, and so the wheelbarrow is the passen-
ger equipment. It is not an infrequent sight for a small-
footed woman to be balanced by a live pig securely
strapped to the other half of the barrow. A sail is raised,
the shafts are lifted, and down the path between the quiet
rice fields the comical freightage races, for the sooner
the journey is over the better for the one to whose
shoulders the shafts are tied. As no iron is used in
north China in the wooden cart wheels, which are mor-
tised, dovetailed and wedged, after one has washed his
face in a pan at a Gobi desert well, the precious water
must be poured on the wheels to swell them, so that they
will not fall apart. Vehicles bearing the yellow flag have
the right of way; they are carrying Imperial supplies. It
is a marvelous country of the honorableness of little
things. No man has much, but every man has some-
thing, and is drilled to find that something a little more
than sufficient, for little pessimism is reflected in the coun-
try's literature.

The elastic, easeful methods of the race will be under-
stood by their having no word to express hour, minute
or to-morrow. They can say night and day, but they

172 THE CHINESE

must use a metaphor from nature or custom when they
express anything shorter than kill (fifteen minutes)
" The time it would take a turtle to crawl a li " would
be half a day. " The time it would take a lark to swal-
low a grasshopper " expresses an instant. " The time
you would get shaved " indicates half an hour. " The
time it would take to swallow a good-by cup of tea "
expresses two minutes. The word " to-morrow " can
only be expressed by an affix of " future " to the active
verb.

They call their whisky " the liquor that has three
fires " (samschu), and the inventor of this distillation of
rice, Ih Tih, is referred to as " the partner of the devil "
by the school teachers. The liquor is always taken hot,
and the idiom for saying, " I have taken a drink," is " I
have painted my face." The propaganda against the use
of wine has been sedulously and effectively pursued since
its institution by the second king of the Chau dynasty,
who was contemporary with David. Their effective cru-
sade against drugs (opium) belongs to a much later date,
even the twentieth century.

IV

CHINESE HUMOR

Three races, and three races alone, — the American, the
Scotch and the Chinese, — appreciate and constantly use
humor. The American, divining the point like a prophet,
begins to laugh ere the incident is fully related; the
drolly slow Scot does not chuckle until he has first
rounded the humor in his mind, and satisfied himself
that it is true coin. The stoical Chinese laughs not at
all, before or after, but next day in sincerest flattery, in
his wide charity, he will pass your story along, and lie.
and his will trust you for evermore, because for a moment
you have lightened the load of care of a fellow mortal.
All three races live life very seriously, — even religiously,
— and welcome that forgiveness of attitude which clothes
human defects with the smile of tolerance. The Chinese
of course chiefly selects such characteristic subjects as
the disappointment of the father of ten daughters and
no sons ; the husband henpecked by his last wife as much
as by his first two; the bonze who added to his geomantic
threatenings and discoveries, as famine kept the people
from supplying his coffers; the discovery of an honest
tax-gatherer; the pig trying not to laugh as he balanced
the proud beauty on the other half of the wheel-barrow;
Truth changing the inscription on a mandarin's honorary
pailo arch; the professional mourner saying a cheerful
" hello " to a friend, though his purchased tears con-
tinued to flow; etc., but in moods like those which follow
he approximates close to our points of view.

173

174 THE CHINESE

The Chinese padlock is composed of a long, thin
brass rod, on which a clasp slides. The usurer of China's
treaty ports is generally a Parsee, who intends to go
home to Bombay when he has heaped his stack of ex-
changed sovereigns high enough. Into Restonji Jam-
shed j's shop on the water Praya of Hong-Kong came
Ng Tso Sui, a debtor in whom humor ran alongside of
dishonesty. Overpowering the little dark man in the
black skull-cap, he took out his large ear-ring, clapped
in the brass padlock, and then offered to exchange the
key of the latter for his canceled note. No Parsee would
dare to admit to his caste that a heathen had ever soiled
his person, and that vagabond and boaster Ng, while
his fellows lean against their fish poles while the nets
are drying on the Lamma beach, again and again descants
how a locksmith after all makes the best fisherman.

The Hakka boatmen of Kowloon enjoy nothing better
than to foment their women into ancestor-villifying
" Billingsgate." The tongue of these women has won
for them the captain's position in the family sampan.
Off Douglas Pier, Hong-Kong', I saw two of the boats
lying sterns together, while from the end of each the
respective queens of vituperation jargoned and alter-
cated. When the wrath was at its height, and a hundred
sampans crowded about to hear the contestants extend
their curses to the seventeenth ancestor (the living having
been consumed early in the conflagration), the two hus-
bands quietly took up the oars. Jerking the boats, they
precipitated the Protean warriors overboard. With one
wild yell from the departing audience, the fray was im-
mediately over, and rescued Peace settled herself in the
bedraggled nest of humiliation.

The Chinese valentine which expresses the greatest in-

CHINESE HUMOR 175

stilt is the one in which a sea-turtle is represented. Man-
darin Chang has been superseded by Mandarin Chuen.
Thereupon Chang mails to the yamen a picture of Chuen's
chair borne by four turtles standing erect in insolence,
instead of turbanned and sashed coolies. The Chinese
consider the turtle the most contemptible animal, and
Chang thereby insinuates that he considers only the
lowest of animals, — much less a human being, — fit to
be near the person of his rival Chuen.

A hungry priest is not averse to adopting the useful
side of humor when his homilies fall on stony ears.
Buddhism teaches that the souls of men come back and
inhabit animals. The priest betakes him to a parishioner
whose fears he knows he can work on, but it must be
one \vho owns a duck yard. Selecting a conspicuous
bird, he exclaims that he knows the sainted soul of
Farmer Lun's father has come back and inhabited that
bird because of its peculiar shuffle, " just like the literary
old man's." Immediately pious Lun asks the priest if
he will not keep the bird where it will hear the monas-
tery's bells of prayer, to which request Pastor Humor
accedes, and later introduces its victim to the bell of a
useful doom.

But the Chinese with all his courtesy, which is by the
book, can enjoy a little humor. When Abbe Hue, the
learned Toulouse monk, was traveling from Peking to
Thibet in 1846, he was occasionally ill at the yamens of
the mandarins. They invariably rolled up their gift of
a yellow lacquered coffin and told him to " forsake sad-
ness and behold in what glory he would die away from
home."

The East Asia News of Canton, printed in the
native character, having cause to denounce the Taotai's

1 76 THE CHINESE

policy in the Yuet-Han Railway matter, capped their ar-
gument by calling this high official : " for ever a dizzy-
headed fish."

A cynic argued with a humorist that even the holiest
of men had some sinful secret, and to prove it, stuck
haphazardly in a bonze's private incense pot, a tablet with
the words : " Alas ! all is known," and for once the
humorist was defeated by the bonze decamping in the
night for parts unknown.

On the long bamboo wharf at Wanchai, coolies in line
bore coal in scoop-shaped baskets to the launches which
were made fast to one side. The early fish boats had
just brought in from the Lamma shoals their supply for
the Hong-Kong market, and the fishermen were busy
balancing on their shoulders buckets filled from the tanks
with live fish. These two lines of men worked to and
fro from coal godown to wharf, and from market to
boats, until some water from a fish-bucket splashed on
the sooty leg of a coal coolie. His leopard spots brought
out the jeers of the fish clan, for the labor unions are
generally made up of one family. Jeers led to names,
and curses to vituperation, until the lines of men dropped
their burdens, and faced each other for a battle, first of
grandfathers' adjectives. Then there was a rush, and
of course the fishermen were the Achilles with the vul-
nerable heel, for the fish were precious and the coal was
not. The coal coolies took the kicks and queue-pulling,
while they emptied their filthy baskets into the fish-
buckets. A score of wide Hupeh grass hats were left to
the grinning ebony victors, while the defeated rushed to
their boats to laundry their eels and garoupa.

When a Chinese beggar thanks you for an aim, he
always says " Taipan " ; that is, " May you be the

CHINESE HUMOR 177

general manager of your firm," and it is noticeable that
these beggars require from your chair coolie the address
of " Laoye" (Sir), before they will get out of the way.
The coolies give this term of respect willingly, for there
is nothing native servants dislike so much as profane
or abusive language; but the smile on the face of the
beggar shows that he is enjoying the humor of the salu-
tation.

A little Hakka girl, who was carrying her brother
papoose-fashion on her back, was asked " Is he heavy? "
and she replied : " No, he is my brother." She was
not thinking of the humor or the humanity of it, but
merely questioning the adjective used, but the grin on
my 'rickisha men's faces showed that they had seen the
other phase.

In the Buddhist monastery of the Goddess of Mercy
at Canton, I asked a native idler for an explanation of
the gilded statue of the goddess Kun Yam, and he re-
plied : " Oh, she Chinee woman who not eat rice ever,
but can eat money any time."

Victoria College, an institution for the education of
native youth in Hong-Kong, while reaping glory the
world over with its graduates in the diplomatic service,
is sowing humor abundantly through its sophomores.
The college paper, The Yellow Dragon, contains the
following letter from a pupil to his father at Canton :

" Don't take any anxiety for me gambling and wan-
dering about in bad habit places. I hope you will not
forget to send me those few dollar for to pass the New
Year here alone. I find my body very weak this year,
but I bowl and play cricket much for strength. I begin
to go to bed at eleven p. M. I am sorry I spent so
many money, but all's well. You are an old man,

1 78 THE CHINESE

father! and ought sleep in earlying and rise in late.
Drink your tea stout and not thin now. Try amuse
your tedium and look some humorous."

One laconic diarist entered as follows : " This day
an Englishman came to the school and gave a disposal
of delivering on the Southern Sea."

A Yaumati cook, who must have had a preceptor
cousin employed as a lawyer's errand boy in one of
those brief-smelling offices up one flight on the south
side of Queen's Road Central, addressed the police of
the Colony across the bay the following petition to search
for his lost brother :

" To the Generals of the Charge Room :

" The humble petition of Tarn Sing, residing at the
ground floor, Upper Station Street, Yaumati, sheweth :
That your petitioner can not find out his brother, who
has been put to be lost after his being abroad from the
above address at three o'clock afternoon, Friday last.
His name is Tarn Noo, with a flat face, sloping eyes, and
common size and height as to his body; he has a yellow
feature, and is a man belonging to the Dong On district,
and his dresses are all black, but his coat was made
of cloth, with brass buttons. His feet are bare without
any shoes or stockings. And your petitioner as in duty
bound, shall ever pray."

A native draper's clerk of Shanghai, as a result of
his visit with a package to be delivered to a European
hong, where he had seen a calendar which attracted his
attention, stormily resurrected his mission school Eng-
lish as follows:

CHINESE HUMOR 179

" Excellent Sirs :

" The Calendar in your Company is glance in looking
to be sure surpassing all the others ; and also it is gigantic
beyond example in connection with its fine spectacle,
while I look at it, and appreciate pieces for oblige."

As an example in homiletic English, I offer the fol-
lowing effort of a colporteur : " Him sorrying his
foolish, and having ashamed it, he was forgave."

A friendly Chinese operator in the Imperial telegraph
service at Kalgan, thus wrote a missionary during the
famous Boxer siege of Peking in June, 1900: "We
have ordered our lineman to go to Peking to peep the
condition. In accounting he shall come back in a few
days when must have a reliable term from him. With
kind regards to yourself and all your combinations."

Cheu Fat, a gourmand, was boasting that as for him,
he could digest anything, even to the wild, oak-leaf
silk of Chifu, when his physician Su replied: "The
trouble is, a man never gets a chance to digest his coffin
cloth."

Huan had refused to join the local Triad Society in
organizing opposition to an unpopular but powerful
magistrate. He thereupon was asked for his reasons,
and replied that he had "ten." And what are they?
" Two wives and eight children."

The native humor for that prosperity which evidences
itself in good living is " Blown tight as a drum." The
letters make a rather pretty monogram to look at. The
artificers in silver of Yung Yan Lane, Canton, who
make belts for European visitors, sometimes mix a little
humor with their art in working together the ideograms.
They are now being exhibited on the waists of many of

i8o THE CHINESE

the primes! of our ladies, who imagine that they are dis-
playing a pearl, all too unknown, of Confucian truth,
which emphasizes again the wisdom of being beautiful
only in one's own language, especially if one is attending
a five o'clock tea at the Chinese Ambassador's.

Shopkeepers seldom put their names on their signs,
but announce their stores by a flowery trade mark.
Some of the lucky legends so used are : " The shop of
Heavenly Peace, dealing in collars and silks ; " The shop
of Emulating the Phcenix, dealing in ivories " ; " The
shop of Extensive Harmony," etc. A white man gen-
erally catches the pronunciation of Chinese before the
meaning, and will swear to you that the Chinese are the
most affable of people, for did not every employee stop
work when he entered, look up, and follow him through
the shop with streaming smiles. The reason of it all
was because Mr. Reginald Thusly, " Griffin," lately from
Eton, but now Colonial Cadet, walked into the collar
shop and inquired patronizingly, " if Mr. Extensive
Harmony was in."

The poetical names of the race are a constant source
of amusement. An irate mandarin came upon our mis-
sionary, who had good reason for never taking him
seriously, to " bluff " him out of town, and announced
his name as " Yuen Chuen " ; i. e., Sweet Spring.

The Peking Gazette of August i6th, 1906, after going
at length into the charter of the Canton-Han-kau Rail-
way, and expatiating on the latitude of the franchise, con-
cluded with this reserved admonition to the directors :
" Think honestly, but act only when you have asked us
how."

The Sin Wan Pao, a native paper, referring to the
signed agreement between the Wai Wu Pu, and the

CHINESE HUMOR 181

British minister concerning the Canton-Kowloon Rail-
way, states: "In addition, the viceroy of Canton has
been instructed to see that the governor of Hong-Kong
understands these clauses in the same way that they are
understood at Peking," possibly the first time in a legal
document that the text may be amended by the inter-
pretation.

Even the most serious' man in all human history, Con-
fucius, was once known to bow to humor. In the Chia
Yu (Family Traditions) classic, the Duke Lu asks the
Sage if any act was more shameful than a man for-
getting his wife, to which the Sage replied : " Yes, when
he forgets himself."

An amusing case of wits saving wind occurred'
August 24th, 1906, on Southbridge Road, Singapore,
where they were erecting iron standards to support wires.
A lunatic butcher with a cleaver was rapidly gaining on a
Celestial, whose eyes fired up with a merry twinkle as he
skinned up the pole like a monkey. From the cross-arm
the gleeful prey very easily kicked down the pursuer,
until the exhausted wretch let his rage froth out in chop-
ping fruitlessly at the iron pole.

Puk Luk was an unemployed coolie of Hong-Kong,
who had a humor to toy with trouble and bon mots. He
spied another coolie on the walk, sitting on a box with
his back to the street, and combing out the feminine
locks of his queue. Puk took to the outer edge and in
passing the tonsorial coolie, he reached out and pur-
loined a brush. Pursuit was given, when Puk fled to a
pile of laundry baskets and hid beneath one. When the
fokis and lukongs were overturning them, Puk bit their
fingers. Questioned by the magistrate wrhy he acted in
this manner, in addition to being a thief, he said, " I was

182 THE CHINESE

teaching fool fokis to turn only baskets which had
smooth edges."

Clans dare not come to blows in the British Colony,
and therefore they ransack their heads for practical
jokes. A man of the Ng Clan comes to Lok's stall in
the Praya market and orders a dozen fowls' heads to be
chopped off. When it is done, Ng facetiously says:
" Now enter that on my account ; I thank you for doing
what I told you," and scampers for the street. Lok in-
furiated immediately pursues, when a confederate Ng
clansman steals what he can from the pile. .When Lok
comes back, if he can not sell the remaining chickens at
once to foreigners, he loses them too, for he can not
afford to keep ice. If Ng's family are rice merchants,
Lok hires a loft for a week in a godown at West Point,
immediately under Ng's rice bins, and gets to work with
his augur. So the humorous war of clan spite runs its
merry round.

The wife of a military man of Hong-Kong, the
glossiest of the silk in her dignified dealings with Am-
erican and European society, had occasion to hire a new
house boy, but the following dialogue explains why the
applicant, who probably had sharpened his wits in the
environs of Queen's College, failed to get the place.
What is your name ? " Oh ! my name belong Gao Kung
Loy." That is too difficult for me to remember, I will
call you just plain John. The Chinese asked, " What
now belong your name, Missee ? " My name is Mrs.
Colonel Errington. The suave Celestial who may yet
lead a retaliatory army, felt up his sleeve, and drawing
down a smile, in a triumphant long lisp drawled:
" Oh! Missee Kulnel Ellington too muchee long for my;
maskee, I callee you plain Tom."

CHINESE HUMOR 183

I do not know whether the following incident is yellow
or white humor. The consulate had a hurried call to
match Piccadilly pomposities against visiting martial
braid at the landing wharf. The silk hat needed
smoothing and master gave his orders. The house boy
was a griffin and sought the aid of the cook coolie, who
stepped into the breach with an alacrity which later
proved to be heroic. . When master's frock-coat was
brushed, he was handed a silk hat, well daubed with
plumbago, to complete the amenities.

The manner in which your house servant appropriates
your rights and chattels is humorously pervert. He
knows that your knowledge of him, his land and his
language, is compassed by two dozen wrords of Pidgin-
English. He waves his occult wand in a realm apart
and watches you perform, which perhaps explains his
everlasting grin. To illustrate. Mrs. Colonel Blank,
very English and lamentably un-Colonial, had just ar-
rived and with that suddenness of the military in things
social, after her month of receiving calls, and with her
effects from home still a month awray, determined to
relieve the accumulation of obligations and ennui by
giving a dinner to some one " high up," to commence
with. It should be something pukka. The General
Commanding His Majesty's Forces in China, (how the
Chinese resent the scope of the title) but located at
Hong-Kong, was chosen as the lion. Going to her
" Number One boy," or comprador, she said : " Boy, I
give dinner this night, belly finee lady, belly finee man,
six piecee; splosem you clatch everything best can do;
sabee " ? In the evening the Number One boy called his
mistress from the enlivened company which was drink-
ing Scotch and Schweppe appetizers on the veranda,

1 84 THE CHINESE

and announced that dinner was served. The Number
Two boy, attired in a long blue tunic, and with his pig-
tail tucked in his waist cord so as not to whip the soup,
swung open the folding doors. Apprehensive, the
hostess looked upon the magic scene ; cut glass and silver
galore, an expanse of occidental and oriental richness.
Upon the face of the general's wife hung that pain which
is born of knowledge suppressed for kindness' sake.
When she could be excused the mistress hastened to the
head servant. " Boy, by all your heathen gods, where
you catchee ; what side ; what fashion ? " " Oh," said the
bland one, " that all plopee easy ; I sabee flend who talkee
how his piecee master go out topside to eat chow to-
night; so he pay (lend) my silver dishee, alee samee you
talk clatch everything best can do." From which it
appeared that the general's boy and the colonel's boy
were fast and reciprocating friends; the former had ad-
vised the latter that his master was going out to dinner
that night, which gave the colonel's boy the opportunity
of his life to ingratiate himself with his mistress for wit,
and to make his master's apparent wealth the wonder of
his guests. The motive either sprang from pride, or
that vast well of humor which is deeper in their hearts
than we Westerners have yet plumbed. Which it was,
judge ye, as you know them.

A humane mandarin of Sing Yuen, who was more
of a statesman at heart than a tax-gatherer, when asked
by his viceroy why he did not " comb " his district
finer, replied : " We should make soup of the eggs, and
not of the hen."

The Chinese petty thief greases his pig tail and also
his bare shining shoulders, so that he may be as hard to
grasp as a jellyfish. A bland-looking, furtive-mannered

CHINESE HUMOR 185

individual, with a resemblance to a native who was once
deported, promenading in Hong-Kong with a finely
oiled queue, is enough for the wary Sikh police. The
smile is at once transferred from the Mongol to the
Hindoo face, as the suspect is led by the slack of the
knickerbockers to headquarters up Wyndham Hill, to
explain why one so poor should be so extravagant in
pomades.

The southern Chinese recite this proverb : " Why is
a pig fat? So that he can not travel far from his mud
and learn that he is a pig. It would never do for him
to go to Tientsin and see larks. He would then not even
be willing to be a thin pig."

The Hakka herders of Kowloon have this witticism
on stubbornness : " The proper way to drive a pig is
the opposite way."

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE

Despite the reiterated epithets that she is the Eternal,
Imperturbable and Impenetrable, during the last five
years China has made more comparative progress than
any nation, and to her will belong the twentieth century,
as the nineteenth was distinctive for the development of
North America.

Japan, and the model colonies of Manila and Hong-
Kong, have not alone influenced China's politics in these
latter days. We may understand somewhat the politi-
cal lethargy of the Chinese in the past if we frequently
call to mind that they seldom contemplated their country
as China (the pure country of the Tsins who built the
Great Wall), but as Chung Kwok, or the Central King-
dom, which could not, from its position, but be an ex-
ample to the whole world. Out of vast indifference to
and ignorance of travel, of course grew this colossal and
stultifying political pride. One of the central provinces,
Hunan, first gave itself the name, until the whole people
have long learned to use it in the belief that their nation
occupied the earth's center, and was accordingly the
most important and self-sustaining, which latter as-
sumption was perhaps justified. What we call Thibet,
the residents thereof call Bod. Next to themselves, the
Chinese ranked the Nui Fan, or internal foreigners, as
the old tribute-paying tribes of Szechuen were called.

186

In order, follows the Wai Fan, external foreigners, or
wandering tribes of Mongolia; the Nui I, or internal
barbarians, like the aboriginal mountaineers of Hainan
Island; and the Wai I, or external barbarians like our-
selves and other irredeemable strangers. Their distin-
guishing word for Englishmen is Hung Mao, men
with red beards; for Americans, Hwa Ki, men of the
Flowery Flag; for Portuguese, who were the first Euro-
peans they met, Si Yang, men of the western ocean;
and for Japanese, Wu Jin, dwarfs. Merely their
locality or appearance, and not their intellect or history,
in the foreigner, appealed therefore to the self-satisfied
Chinese of olden days. But things have changed.

When we say that they have been influenced, we do
not mean to convey the impression that the Chinese to-
day are astounded at the achievements of the Japanese,
for they consider that Japan lacks that essential of per-
manent "greatness, population. Numbers have always
impressed the Mongol, who learned with respect from
the missionary Buddhists in ancient times of another
great people numerically, the Hindoos, and forthwith
showed them honor by giving their religion a place at
the altar.

That it should be possible in recent times that the
great hordes in Russia should experience a political up-
heaval, has induced the discontented and ambitious
among the Chinese, in their organization of the patriotic
Young-China party, to bestir themselves from despair
and torpidity, in the hope that they too may have a
government which will be more intimately in touch with
the desires of the common people, and achieve that
worthy aim of diplomacy: to be valued as a friend and
'feared as a foe. The Parliamentary Commission, sent

1 88 THE CHINESE

to Europe and America in 1906, reported that they were
most impressed with Japan's constitution, and after that
with France's, as the Japanese, when in a similar embryo
state, modeled their constitution after Germany's, but the
report of a Manchu Commission is far from being the
opinion of leaders like Kang Yu Wei, who look to Amer-
ica as a model. Trained in obedience to his father dur-
ing a whole life time, as was the Roman under the
Republic, the Chinese by character offers a steady founda-
tion for the responsibilities of representative rule. The
Commission suggested that a trial of provincial elective
parliaments should be instituted by 1910; these parlia-
ments to choose a provincial executive, who shall be
subordinate to the viceroy now named by the Emperor.
The Progressives, who are asking for more independence
than this, promise that they will soon turn to contempt
Curzon's prophecy of twelve years ago concerning their
race : " Sedet aternuinque sedebit"

China has been easy thus far to govern because she
has been an agricultural people, and not a manufacturing
or urban one. She has no cities the size of ours. The
Clan life which they love, and which has given the na-
tion its peculiar strength, never could have survived if
its vitality had depended on an urban organization.

Nowadays one often hears the ancient prophecy re-
peated : " When yellow snow falls in Peking, the dy-
nasty will end." Such a phenomenon occurred shortly
before the fall of the Ming dynasty. China is coming
to the judgment. If the Manchu successor of that
famous conquering " General of the Eight banners," of
three centuries ago, can not rise to the emergency and
adjust himself, as he did in Kang He's progressive
reign, he must retire, but it is not certain that he will

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 189

miss his opportunity of rendering better service any
more than the Samurai in Japan neglected his, always
remembering that in the fall of rulers, history records
incapacity as great a fault as injustice. Peking is now
divided between the Moderate and Conservative parties;
there is really no advanced section, as there was after
China's war with Japan, and what remains of the last
named party is at Canton. It continues to send delega-
tions to Peking, asking for an immediate constitution,
Upper and Lower Houses of a Diet; juries; freedom of
speech and press; the spread of schools, factories and
foreign books ; pardon of political exiles ; a sane criminal
code ; an advanced railway, foreign and maritime policy ;
the widening of secret society and guild walls into
those of political parties; etc. How every one dares to
laugh now at the old edict pasted up in the tea-houses
"Mo Tan Kvo shih"; "Don't talk politics, By order."
Of course rule by delegation is not perfection in the
respect that government should be exercised by the
people, but if the Manchu improves in his rule as the men
of Satsuma have, something will be gained. When the
Chinese criticizes the airs of his Manchu ruler, his idiom
is : " He wears his hat on one side." It was the Manchu,
and not the native Ming dynasty, which taught the
Chinese the doctrine of the exclusion of foreigners.
The Manchu has made some concessions to Chinese
criticism. Last year the ancient ban against mixed
Manchu and Chinese marriages was removed and this
year saw the last of the Manchu generals withdrawn
from the provinces, thus leaving the Civil Viceroy, who
is often a Chinese, free. Is it prophetical that the
Manchu has not called his legal city the capital of the
land, but only the capital (Ching) of the north (Pel) ?

190 THE CHINESE

Peking is really a poor location for a capital, as it is
removed from the center of population. On this ac-
count, Yunnan Province has never really been governed
from Peking. The old capital of the Mings, Nanking
(literally, Capital of the South) was a much better loca-
tion, and Han-kau would be better still. Now that rail-
ways are opening up the land, there is no reason why the
capital should not be at Choong King, or Ching Too in
Szechuen. It would be the center of population and
bind Yunnan and Thibet and the greatest and most am-
bitious of them all, Kwangtung, closer to the throne.
There are precedents for something apparently so radical,
for we must remember that in so-called changeless China,
there have been thirteen changes of capital.

There are only five million Manchus among the four
hundred million Chinese. Even in Manchuria, the Man-
chus who cut only enough cedar and arbor-vitse wood to
warm them, and fish and hunt only what will barely feed
them, when their pension is spent, are dying off, and
thrifty Chinese emigration from Shantung is filling the
land, which is revenge enough for the capturing of
Peking in 1644 by the Manchu Dor Gun. In the same
way the Chinese are peacefully conquering Mongolia by
squatting on the lands of the roving Tartars, who are
pushed farther into arid Gobi, or compelled to sober up
and settle down among the new tillers of the soil.

Much has been made abroad of the Wei, the " squeeze
pidgin," or peculation of the Manchu officials, who are
scattered throughout the empire. The Mongolian, who
has suffered more from them, does not say " he has
squeezed me," but " he has eaten me." In the first place,
it must be observed that this is not a charge against the
great Chinese people. It will be found, as it is among

m

. '- _

-1* •*fc*^pf

China's best-known statesman, Li Hung Chang, in his Vice-royal
Yamen at Tientsin, September, 1900.

Li Hung Chang, with the American General Ward, and the British
General Gordon, saved the Manchu throne in the dangerous
Tae-ping rebellion of the Southern provinces in 1865.
From that year until 1901 he was the late Empress
Dowager's right-hand statesman in her deal-
ings with foreigners, and the internal
reforms which the trend of the times
forced her to adopt.

ill

Marching Home ! Gallant 6th U. S. Cavalry after brilliant relief

of Peking, North China, siege of 1900. The allies admitted

that the Americans were the best marksmen and

brainiest open-order fighters in the allied

armies. This is the first time fine

cavalry horses were seen in China.

American section of captured wall of Tien-tsin, North China, siege
of 1900. Soldier of I4th U. S. Infantry on guard.

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 191

other people, that small salaries for large responsibilities
led to this obnoxious practice, which came in with Man-
chu rule. For instance, the governor-general of Mon-
golia receives on the pay-roll five thousand dollars, and
the residents of such centers as Keren and Kashgar aver-
age only eighteen hundred dollars, while the greatest ef-
fectiveness is expected of them in diplomacy. Sir Robert
Bredon, their foreign director of the imperial customs,
receives only twenty-five thousand dollars salary. When,
through systematization of collection, China's revenue
is greater, as it is becoming, " squeeze " will die out, as
no race, — ruled or rulers, — are more inclined to be hon-
est. They have never had parties, with a rotation of
plunder, in China. The Chinese Triads differ from the
Japanese Samurai in this, that they do not believe liberty
will be a gift from a superior class, as the Japanese nobles
endowed the clans with a partial constitution. This was
the only time in the world's history when political rights
were so established, and they do not think it has proved
satisfactory. They believe they will have to win from
the higher powers their liberty in the good old Anglo-
Saxon way, by argument all the time and arms part of
the time. Reform really began at the close of the China-
Japan war. Now that the obstructionist Dowager Em-
press Tse Hsi is gathered to her ghostly traditions, doubt-
less the Cantonese Kang Yu Wei will return, and the
brilliant Yuan Shi K'ai of Pechili, stubborn Shum from
the south; tried and solid old Chang from the central
provinces; the Columbia College bred Tang Shao Yi;
Viceroy Tuan Fang, the Manchu who, in Shensi, saved
the Christians in 1900; the Yale graduate Liang Tun
Yen; the Cambridge graduate Shen Tun Ho, and their
like, will gather around the new Regent for the renewal

i92 THE CHINESE

of the militant and reform plans so suddenly and dis-
astrously dropped in 1897.

Who are the men of the hour in China, on whom
Americans should keep their eyes? Who are the strong
characters, a study of whose modern personality will
make China far more interesting to us henceforward?

First, because he held high offices, let us mention Yuan
Shi K'ai, lately deposed by the new Regent from his
viceroy and chancellorships. Yuan is the best equipped,
most practical, most modern, and most popular with the
foreigners in Peking, of all Chinese statesmen. He is
the organizer of China's modern army of the north.
He succeeded in what his predecessor Li Hung Chang
tried to do, in establishing mills, mines and railways in
the north. He is the best financier in China, and a be-
liever that honesty is the most economical fiscal policy,
when you come to borrow again or refund loans. Con-
trary to the Empress Dowager's orders, he saved the
Christians from the Boxers when he was viceroy of
Pechili Province, but there is always some flaw in the
jewel. By his betrayal of reform in 1897 he made Box-
erism possible. While till lately he was high in the
Manchu councils and offices, he is a native Chinese by
blood. He was dismissed by the Regent, Prince Chun,
in 1909 on the excuse that he had disastrously relapsed
once from reform and betrayed the extensive modern
plans of the late Emperor Kwang Su to the inexpressible
Dowager Empress, thus bringing on the reactionary coup
d'etat of 1898, which postponed reform for ten years.
He may be restored if Manchu jealousies cease to attack
Chinese officials, and one hope of his return lies in the
fact that he had an eye for choosing the most capable
subordinates available. These men are a powerful col-

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 193

lege, devoted to his personal cause. He is a conservative
rather than a radical reformer. He believes in the power
of the press, and is not averse to bribing it. He is ex-
tremely unpopular with Kang Yu Wei, also a native
Chinese, their greatest and most radical reformer, the
Roosevelt of China, who is now in exile in hot Penang
Straits Settlements, under the protection of Britain.

Who is this Kang, who, like Roosevelt, shows his teeth
as he eagerly prepares to attack his opponent with a
spring, back of which is the whole incorruptible soul of
a leader whose impetus is as weighty as that of a host?
He is the New China, — has been it since 1897, and it
was the example of British organization at Hong-Kong
which inspired him who came out of Canton near-by.
Had he started north overland with another army of
Taepings, he would have won the throne and held it.
No, he rather chose education and sought the Emperor
for a pupil. He is hated by the old conservative Man-
chus, and even the literati of the disbanded Tsung Li
Yamen (Foreign Office) of Peking, who are as skilful
and unprincipled " disappearance artists " as a doge's
cabal, or the private metropolitan detective agencies, fed
by corrupt millions, which have grown up in some of our
western civilizations. He was joint author with the
Emperor Kwang Su of the shower of reform edicts of
1897, on which China's hopes of modernity to-day rest.
His name spreads like the spirit of an informing angel
over the whole of China, and every new official, especially
those educated in America, who has seen a light, goes
sometime to the Oracle Kang to feed it with oil.

Perhaps the Fates have ordained it that he shall keep
his light pure, and never trade in the spoils of office,
thus the better to inspire those who must soil their hands

i94 THE CHINESE

in active politics, pure as the intent of the best may be.
But he chafes at this, for he is many sided. He wants
to be as active as Yuan, who adopted his ideas and be-
trayed them once for office, though Yuan, from 1898 to
1908, returned to moderate reform, and steady, conserva-
tive progress. In America, of course, such spirits as
Kang could not be side-tracked by intrigue, and that
more than anything proves the balance of our constitu-
tion and institutions. In China it is yet possible, and
even Yuan has at last suffered by it. Kang is not an
ultra reformer. He proposes to absorb the Manchu and
not to eradicate him. He speaks well of the late Kwang
Su's powers, and he hates the memory of the late Dow-
ager, in which we agree with him. Kang is more senti-
mental, sensitive and versatile than any Chinese leader.
The very dangers of poison and dagger that beset him;
the necessity for a circle of iron to guard him, show best
the need of our sympathy with these men who propose
strongly to attack the old political literati of China in their
ancient privileges and prejudices. Kang's power from
his remote retreat is shown in the disgrace of even so
august an official as Yuan. Kang's name is the one most
spoken by all Chinese within foreign borders, and
it is these returning Chinese who leaven their country's
institutions, and every American who can should take
a Chinese student to his bosom and impress, ere he de-
parts for home, the vitalizing spirit of liberty. They will
never forget, for, after all, they are as capable of great
enthusiasms as they are of undying forbearance, which,
till now, has been their distinguishing characteristic.

There is also Sun Yat Sen, a neighbor in exile at
Penang. He would go straight to the core of the trouble
with the sword. He is a reformer, of course, but called

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 195

a revolutionist because he does not know whom besides
himself he would enthrone after the leader had won the
cause. He likes republics. Unlike Kang, he would oust
the Manchu. He is one of our men of mark, because he
represents the eventual force which will come into play
if China does not reform, and he deserves respect for his
sincerity. His influence is potent. He has no Boxer
spirit, for he appreciates the foreigner, but seat him in
power and he could be an uncompromising Boxer, for
he is exceedingly patriotic, and lives within far narrower
mental lines than Kang.

Liang Chi Choa is the writer of the reform party, also
at Penang in exile, who selects leavening foreign books
and fills China, notwithstanding the frantic Censor Pu
(Board), with their translations and his applications of
them. He would make a splendid secretary of state if
China ever became a republic. We have no idea what
an imptrium ex imperio this company at Penang is in
influencing the aspirations and opinions of the younger
officials throughout the empire.

Wu Ting Fang, so well known to Americans, by right
should claim the longest review. He assuaged our fears
in the anxious days of the Peking siege, for he alone,
for two excruciating months, in all the world knew that
our legations were safe. How he knew he will never
tell, and I would not steal the secret from his code if
I could. He is the redoubtable, the learned and the true.
What he has done for scientific, civic and legal reform in
China, at great personal danger to himself, can hardly
be recounted. He is as well known at Hong-Kong as
at Peking and Washington. He is no leader of arms
or politics ; he is a quiet deep molder of methods, perfect
in his judgment, a chancellor facile princeps. Watch

196 THE CHINESE

him as he works from year to year for Chinese and
American progress and approximation, as well balanced
as a Waltham wheel. We are rather discussing strong
men at their mighty work, and it is therefore a light
thing, perhaps, to add that Wu is also the Chesterfield of
China in all the graces of speech and manners.

The Regent Chun of the royal blood of longest reign
of all the world's thrones, belongs to this new set, which
is in the ascendant. He is a Manchu, of course. I have
seen him face to face at Hong-Kong and studied him.
He obeyed Kang and took revenge on Yuan for betraying
the plans of 1897. The Regent is the pivot on which all
now turns. He has the opportunity of the Chinese ages,
a John the Baptist to usher in the new era. He is the
youngest of the leaders, the unfortunate perpetuation of
the Chinese system of the last fifty years of having an
infant as titular ruler and a spokesman in its place. It
is a bad system, growing out of the greed of politicians,
but it is not Chun's fault. He loved his brother Kwang
Su, and no doubt sympathizes with his reform plans,
which he is now putting in force. He is to be pardoned
somewhat if he should yield now and then to the bitter
attack of the reactionaries. He is to be pitied, for at-
tack him they will, and a long list of greater than he
have fallen, even the mighty Kang himself. But reform
is here, and he is with it, — reform both in Manchu and
Chinese circles.

There remains at Peking Prince Ching, an uncle of the
Regent, the old Manchu watch-dog who has been the
power behind three Manchu thrones. I do not mean to
say that he displaced the Dowager in late years, but his
growl was often heard. He has not a modern education,
but if sanity, strength and steadiness count in reform,

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 197

Ching is still to be reckoned with, and his old force will
make itself felt. He does not want a fool China any
more than the reformers do. It was Ching who ad-
vocated sending Chinese girls abroad to study, and bring-
ing foreign governesses into China. This is the most
surprising recommendation that has been offered at
Peking.

Then there is dear old Chang Chih Tung, who never
betrayed a foreign friend, but who is by no means a
sycophant of the white man. He is now a reformer, for
he has always been one. Let him tell you at the outset
that he will never consent to a jot of reform in Chinese
classics or religion, and you will trust his honesty for ever
and grant his demand. Yea, he has written a funny book
on the subject. It is funny because it is unnecessary.
But he will follow you nearly anywhere else. He was
building mills, arsenals, opening mines, running railways
and ships, while Kang was still at his books. He has a
modern army second only to Yuan's in efficiency at the
targets and in manceuvers. He knocks hard at our tariff
wall, and says, " Take it down a little lower and I will put
my Han-kau iron in." He has already landed two car-
goes of pig at Brooklyn, and is every week landing
cargoes at Japanese ports. He makes all the rails for
his own railways, and he has more railways in operation
than there are in the whole empire of Japan. In in-
dustrial organization, he is the J. Pierpont Morgan of
China, but he gives his fortune back to the State, and
doesn't own a review, pulpit or newspaper to tell about
it. Your interview ended, he will call you back again
and emphasize : " Remember, put me down for no reform
in classics or religion." What can you do with a man
like this but grant him all he asks and love him, though

198 THE CHINESE

you lose all your sacred ambitions for western mission-
aries and books. Chang won't read a line Liang Chi
writes, but he has been doing for years exactly what
Liang, you and I have been recommending in what we
have written. " An old fogy," is he? rather the " Grand
Old Man " of China, marching steadily with the youngest
and carrying the largest knapsack of deeds done.

These are the representative leaders of China to-day,
and they are as diverse as our own leaders in the talents
which have been committed to them, but underlying their
characters, with one exception, are the world-wide es-
sentials of courage, singleness of purpose, devotion to
country, unselfishness, and hate of graft, which is the
prevailing tendency of our age, as absolute as it is hated
by the God of all men, yellow or white.

You will notice that the Manchu has been diligent in
one thing, to place his Uigur character, of corkscrew ap-
pearance like the Syrian, opposite the Chinese character
on the copper coin, but this is the whole of his literary
conquest, for even the Manchu officials, scattered through-
out the Kingdom, are devoted to the Chinese literature
and language. Over the East Gate of Mukden, in a
large plain tympanum, a Confucian motto has been cut
in Chinese and Manchu characters. However, other con-
siderations have now a certain bearing there. Around
the Black Stone of Mukden, which the Manchus consider
the center of the earth, circles a new influence, — that of
the Japanese. Whether this will drive the Manchus into
the arms of the Chinese, as the loss of Hanover endeared
the Guelph house to the Br'tish, remains to be seen.

There is no caste question to fetter the race, as India
has been retarded and disrupted, and if China is only
now approaching a constitutional government, she has

long been preparing for it by the most wonderful dem-
ocracy of letters which the world has ever known. The
old divisions of society fall into Scholars, Farmers. Ar-
tisans, Merchants; the Soldier and the Priest having no
standing, and being called the " Trouble Makers." The
new divisions are to be, Literature, Politics, Trade, —
which is probably one more division than we have in our
own.

An emigration of one million a year is rapidly filling
up Malay, Borneo, Java, Siam and Burmah with Chinese,
and sealing them in bonds of blood, literature and com-
merce, to the home land. As compradors, bankers, mer-
chants and laborers, they are spreading over the whole
Orient, just as the Roman did from the Pyrenees to the
Euphrates, and theirs is none the less a conquest, though
it is peaceful. But whether or not the Home Rule
" Ming " flag that last floated over the moat of Nanking
flutters free again, the spirits of Hung Woo and Hung
Tsin are marching on with the progress of the Chinese
race. Only may it be that the feet of nationalism in her
frenzy may not be directed in bloodshed against the Si
Fan, or white foreigner. This is our prayer, but we
must expect some disappointments as progress develops
her tips and downs. Shall we take seriously the rapid
development of the " Restorer of Rights " party, and'
articles such as the following written by a student in the
Hang Chan Pchoa Pao, or Courier: "O! White
Faces and red-bristled barbarians, when we of the
Flowery Land shall march forth to war, then shall you
be brayed even as are drugs in a mortar ? " The East has
always been like its Thibetan glaciers; when any move-
ment warms it, it moves in a mass, and therein has been
its danger to opponents since the time of Kublai Khan.

200 THE CHINESE

We recall the following manifesto, written during the
Opium War with England : " There is that English
nation, whose ruler is as often a woman as a man, and
which devours Southern peoples, first peeling the fat off
their estates. Their island is a petty one; they trust en-
tirely to wooden dragons (ships). Could we reach them,
we should hurl them over as the blast does the thin bam-
boo. If we let them settle on the Pearl (Canton River)
it will be like opening the door and bowing in Mr. Wolf !
In the hour of our patriotism, even our wives and daugh-
ters, finical and delicate as jewels, have learned to dis-
course of arms. The high gods clearly behold; fight till
the golden pool is fully restored to honorable peace."
Pou Toun Kiao Li (one religion or another, we Chinese
are all brothers) say they, when they think of those who
criticize or challenge them.

This stolid but revengeful enough race has been stung
until they have struck, and may strike again at all foreign
domination, whether Manchu, Macaense, Mikado or Mis-
sionary, in their striving after the extinction of what,
since the viceroy of Che-kiang drove the Portuguese
out of Ningpo in 1542, they have considered their great-
est humiliation, viz. : the sacrilege of foreign colonies on
the mainland of their sacred country — Kiao-chou held
by Germany ; Shanghai by triple occupation ; Kowloon by
Britain ; Macao by Portugal ; Port Arthur by Japan, and
Kwang Chow by France. This feeling particularly mani-
fests itself at present over the decisions of the extra-
territoriality courts. They claim that they should judge
a foreigner who breaks their laws just as Japan does ; he,
of course, to have the privilege of appeal by his consul
if the punishment exceeds what the foreign law would
adjudge. They cite the precedent of the strangling for

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 201

murder of an American in 1821 on the little execution
ground between the pottery jars, back of the Yamen,
Canton, where so many Americans have stood since then,
little dreaming of this particular history. How differ-
ently they do it in Japan is hereby illustrated. One, F.
J. C, a British subject, was sentenced in April, 1906, un-
der Article 402, by Judge Satomi in the Yokohama Dis-
trict Court, to twelve years' imprisonment for arson, in
an attempt to collect two thousand yen insurance on his
household furniture, and five days were allowed for ap-
peal. It is largely this extra-territoriality occupation by
foreigners which is precipitating Chinese patriotism, just
as the shelling of Kagoshima by the British in 1863,
and the occupation of Shimonoseki and Yokohama by the
allies in 1864 precipitated the patriotic clans upon the
weak Shoguns, and evolved the new, proud, united and
powerful Japan.

Another cause which is solidifying Chinese patriotism
is the lucrative concessions, far more opulent than at
first imagined, secured by foreigners at little cost. I
refer particularly to the Peking Syndicate in Shensi ; the
Franco-Belgian Syndicate in Honan, etc. In other
words, the central government practically gave away
provincial concessions, which the newspapers are telling
the people are invaluable, in fact the richest in the world,
as Richtofen long ago prophesied. Neither are the bitter
memories of Peking in 1900 forgotten in this connection.
Popularly translated, the significant comments run about
as follows : " And why does the foreign soldier shoot ?
Just to loot, loot, loot ! " The soldiers of Yuan Shi K'ai
will tell you how the Russians in 1900 piled precious
blackwood furniture outside the walls of Tong Tchow,
and set fire to it just to warm their hands, and how they

202 THE CHINESE

dug up the native cemetery of Tientsin, to exhume
the valuables buried with the dead.

There remains the bugbear of the Chinese Exclusion
Acts in America and Canada, which the Chinese would
have been entirely patient with, had not the Japanese
been accorded an astounding preference. It ought to
be a very simple thing, considering the higher standards
of living and education in the white countries as com-
pared with the yellow, and the high tariff burdens upon
the poor in the white countries, to exclude once for all
day laborers from emigration across the Pacific.

A popular fete of the people held in July throws a
pleasant light upon a phase of their patriotism. To the
foreigner this festival seems to be a pretty boat carnival,
which originated at Chang Sha near the Tung Ting Lake,
but the races are preceded by the religious ceremony of
searching for the body of Ken Yuen, a famous popular
minister whom the Emperor dismissed for urging re-
forms, and who thereupon committed suicide by drown-
ing in the year 450 B. C. The dragon boats came to be
used because, the legend is, the gifts were stolen by a
fierce sea monster. The fishermen therefore adopted the
all-conquering dragon's head and tail for the bow and
stern of their long, narrow racing boats. Here is a
national ceremony of patriotism continued uninterruptedly
for two thousand three hundred years. In the blue Hang-
chow cemetery is a remarkable iron statue of four offi-
cials loaded with chains, kneeling before the door of the
tomb of the patriot, General Yoh, the leader of the Sung
forces whom they murdered in treacherous alliance with
the Tartars. It is probably the only monument con-
demning official infamy in the world. Respect for the
antiquity of the human race must grow in our minds

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 203

when we consider that in conversing with the Chinese of
to-day, we are really conversing, because of their un-
changed customs, laws and physiognomy, with men ex-
actly similar to those who were contemporary with the
men of Babylon. China has another interest for the
dwellers on the North American continent, in that the
coal deposits and range formation reveal a land geologic-
ally speaking contemporaneous with our own, which
starts some inquiries as to the age of our Indians, and
their possible descent from the Chinese, whether via the
Aleutian isles, or junks drifting via Honolulu.

It is owing to the following command of Confucius
in the Li Chi (Filial Duty) that the nation has so long
remained passive: " I would teach people justice, benev-
olence and virtue; I would lead them not to build walls
or moats, but to turn the weapons of war into instruments
of husbandry." But now behold the alarming change.

Japan has taken almost entire charge of China's mili-
tary schools and army, or Chang Pei Kun, which is
assurance of its advancing effectiveness, and the minimiz-
ing of hampering traditions. The modern military
schools at Canton, Nanking and Peking turn out three
hundred officers a year, and Japan's schools add seven
hundred Chinese military graduates a year, so that the
provincial " armies of the Green Standards " are rapidly
being officered on the most approved lines, especially in
the Artillery, Pou To ; Engineers, Kung Chung To ; and
mounted Infantry, Ma To. It is perhaps premature to
say that there will be war, but there could certainly at
any time now be a war in which China would be as diffi-
cult to humble as Japan would have been ten years ago,
but the comparison between these two countries will end
shortly, when railways join the provinces, and make

204 THE CHINESE

China unsubduable, because united. How little the prov-
inces have known one another can be judged by the fact
that the Yangtze River, " the girdle of China," has a
different name in each of the nine provinces through
which it flows. What a vast body of soldiers, already
inured to marches on little food, would the wheelbarrow
men of Honan alone make, and Honan sent ten thousand
troops to Viceroy Chang's last autumn manoeuvers, which
covered an attack along the line of the Han-kau-Peking
Railway. Moreover, Japan is desirous that China shall
raise an army of five hundred thousand men, which will
permit of Japan reducing her force necessary to guard
the East from those whose land hunger she most hates,
Russia, Germany and France. She will officer this army
for a while, but she desires that China shall pay its cost.
She wants another half million of her own men for ten
years to lay by their rifles for spindle and steam hammer,
and make her rich enough again to set to and take what
the Treaty of Portsmouth did not give her.

No more does the gong beat the romantic call to arms
under the East Gate of Canton and in the Kwan Tois, or
State Temples of the God of War. The bugle call has
been learned, and its windings are heard in every plain of
China, from the sandy parade ground outside the Anting
Gate at Peking, where it first caught the sound from
Japanese lips a few years ago, to the military common
beneath the parapet of the ancient metropolis of the south.
The former Chinese formation was the Ying, i. e., a
division of five hundred in Infantry and two hundred and
fifty in Cavalry, as the horse was considered to be equal
to a man in those humorous days of Demonstration,
when the triangular banner was anointed before the battle
was formally opened. Soldiers built the Great Wall of

The now disbanded Board of the Tsung-li-yamen, Peking, which

advised the late Empress Dowager in her dealings with foreign

powers for 33 years of evasive diplomacy. The Board is

now reorganized in the more enlightened Wai-wu-pu.

Two members of the Board are Manchus

and two are Chinese.

Chinese officials at Amoy, Nov., 1908, entertaining officers and

crews of American fleet. Admiral Emery proposing

health of Empress Dowager

The famous American Legation building on Chiao Min Hsiang

Street, Peking, which went through the two sieges, first by

the Boxers, and later by the foreign allies, in 1900.

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 205

China, as they probably did the Pyramids. Soldiers in
China have always acted as masons of public works, street
sweepers, and grasshopper catchers in country districts;
but under the new system, their respectability is enhanced
by release from these duties. There is an old proverb of
theirs which describes the past : " We make our soldiers
from our worst men, just as we make our nails from our
worst iron."

These efforts of China should be looked upon with
friendliness, for government must now become more
effective, and there should be fewer causes for alter-
cation under the more thorough regime of a newly
centralized government, with viceroys powerful in their
provinces by coordinate law and arms, and not by cor-
ruption, all of which will give place in time to power
directed by provincial and national deliberative assem-
blies. A China which will not allow any or every na-
tion to camp on the edge of her robe, just because she
wears a long one, and take a bite off her rice-cake and
persimmon without asking permission, just because they
look appetizing, a China more responsible because she:
is encouraged in self-respect, should find extended to her
the friendly hands of the nations. This has really been
the intent of the friendly policy of America, and the
coercive diplomacy of England for sixty years. When
China understands it so, she will rank Elliot as her friend
above " Chinese " Gordon. China at last is doing her
part toward ending the regimes of bluster and interna-
tional bad manners, and binding the last link around the
globe of arbitration as the means of settling disputes,
because none dares try any other. When it comes to
standing up like men, and taking that most bitter of
medicines, the payment of a national indemnity, history

206 THE CHINESE

records the fortitude of the Chinese on every occasion.
The opium war indemnity of twenty-one millions was
paid promptly, and the indemnities to Japan and the
allied powers are of recent liquidation. What volumes
this speaks for the sincerity, patience, and lack of false
pride of this race ! In the West, right consists of dying
rather than admitting you are nationally wrong.

There are, of course, those in China who fear that the
new armies will become the State, as it is becoming in
Japan, and as it was in Rome in the days following Sylla.
China's foreign wars have, till now, been carried on by
the provinces separately, Kwangtung fighting England
in the Opium War, and even as late as the China-Japan
war, in which one province and a dependency (Chili and
Manchuria) took part against the invader without the
assistance of the other provinces. The extension of rail-
ways and newspapers are therefore prerequisite to united,
militant China.

There is indisputably something seismic at present dis-
turbing this great people, something probably comparable
to the forgotten upheavals which ejected Kublai Khan,
Attila and Cyrus into history. Only the other day, in
this country where as yet news travels slowly and where
railways are few, fifty thousand men arose in the extreme
south, and started on their way to the extreme north, to
the wheat fields of Manchuria, where the government, re-
membering the successful repeopling of Szechuen from
Kiang-si after the Ming rebellion, offered each man ten
mao of land free of taxes for five years. The movement
was certainly not political, like those we constantly hear
the Triad Society is launching, with foreign missionaries
as an excuse, but riots at Canton and Chifu eddied
round it, men longing in their strength to be as effective

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 207

or as troublesome as other mortals who seek new things
because they are disgusted with past things. Their ora-
tors pointed out the black breath of war-ships on the hori-
zon, and the white battleship of the United States, the
Wisconsin, in the offing, and said : " We too could own
such, only we would paint it yellow." We who heard
them, felt that they, too, could pick up the word Jung
(glory) and follow it as terribly as other races have done,
or as their Genghis did. Strict surveillance is kept at the
treaty ports that no arms are smuggled in, but somehow
or other the astute Japanese, especially through the port
of Macao, are getting rid of their obsolete guns through-
out China, where the students by tens of thousands are
eager to possess a rifle. There is something of a nuisance
in this, internationally, as it is found that the pirates of
the West River, who previously have been poorly armed,
are now more than a match for the government gunboats.
The power of the viceroys or Tsung Tuhs, who rule
without legislative assembly or Censor Board, may be
judged by that exercised by the late Chum in the Two
Kwangs, who had his own army, navy and mint. With
headquarters at Canton, he led in the anti-foreign boy-
cott of 1905-6, and in all the new movements of reviving
Chinese pride and patriotism. He it was who conceived
the idea of a port at old Whompoa, and railway con-
nection to Canton, in order to displace Hong-Kong as the
emporium of southern China. Viceroy Tsen Chum
Hsuen, known to most foreigners as the " unpopular
Chum," was not a native of either of the two provinces
which he governed. He not only headed the civil and
judicial service, but commanded the army and navy.
Twenty million people bowed to his unquestioned author-
ity. His aim was to drill in the south an army of one

208 THE CHINESE

hundred thousand, which should reach the recent credit-
able performance of the Pechili army of Yuan Shi K'ai's
(also a Chinese and not a Manchu), which the Han-
Yang arsenal equipped with " wireless " wagons ; rifles
of Mauser pattern; field-guns painted gray; Japanese
kits weighing fifty-four pounds, which included acces-
sories for " first aid," field-glass and blanket. The Ger-
man goose-neck step and swinging of the left arm are
practised on march. In September last the Kwang-si
branch of this army, in order to suppress a rebellion at
Limchow, made in one day over bad roads through
mountainous country, two hundred li, or sixty-five miles,
in forced marches. Uniforms are of red-trimmed khaki.
It is interesting to recall that the uniforms of the Boxers
were red and black. The southern army carries triangu-
lar banners ; the northern square.

The bugle, and not word of mouth, is now used for
command, and regimental songs, patterned on the Japa-
nese style, are taught with the idea that the esprit de corps
is raised thereby. For a while the Tartar general's
troops in residence were added to Chum's forces, but he
returned them, as he desired to appeal to local enthusi-
asm. The Tartar troops are paid two dollars and ninety
cents Mexican a month. Chum paid his provincial troops
eight dollars Mexican a month. The ribbons were
taken from the men's queues, which were rolled tight
under their caps. Such is the force which Chum turned
over to his successor, Chow Fu. Chum was removed
largely because of the protests of Hong-Kong over the
piratical attack on the Sainam. He will be heard of
again when radical things happen in China. He and his
sort have been emboldened by their dream of awakening
national possibilities, and engraven on their hearts is

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 209

the recovery of Formosa and Manchuria from the
Japanese and Russians. We must not despair of Chinese
ambitions and liberties because the new leaders, in driving
the chariot of progress over the narrow barrow roads of
a past civilization, constantly find one wheel either lost in
the fetid ooze, or jolting upon the rocks of the ditch.

There is on the other hand the Japanese version of the
future of China, which- is a division ten years hence of
China's " invalid sovereignty " into spheres of influence,
until such time as Japan is able financially to gather all
the spheres into her own bundle as she did the Korean,
Formosan and South Manchurian. The persistent hu-
manitarian tendency of the Chinese crops through even
the soldier's armor in the following Mongolian maxim:
" What was the most magnanimous act ever known ?
When General Tso burned the unread correspondence of
the implicated in the tents of the vanquished."

Again there is the American and British version, that
there certainly must sometime be a conflict on the Pa-
cific for leadership, which Japan now arrogates to her-
self. It will then be necessary for America to destroy
Japan's navy, whenever Britain, Russia and America
agree on the integrity of China; the evacuation of Man-
churia by Japan and Russia; the retention of India by
Britain, and Korea by Japan, and the patrol of the Pacific
by America, just as the Atlantic seas must be delegated
to British fleets. The sooner this comes the better, from
a humanitarian point of view. It alone can save to the
white man that distant empire which fronts the Southern
Cross, and that Canada, which for one thousand miles
looks out on the broad blue swells of the portentous Pa-
cific. In their scheme to impress the Chinese that they
alone are masters, socially, the Japanese working in

210 THE CHINESE

China resign from any work when a European is placed
over them, saying: "Shall the torch of Asia bow to
candles; has the East not hurled back the phalanxes of
Alexander, the legions of Rome, the cavalry of the
Crusaders, and the artillery of Russia? — and we can re-
new the lesson to Europe any time."

In the East we constantly observed in print the name of
Mutsuhito, Emperor of Japan, and we continually
heard Banzai (I wish you a myriad years) called out by
the fervid Japanese at mention of his name, but seldom
in China did we hear the name of the late Kwang Su, the
Tsing Emperor and High Priest of China, who had been
reigning thirty-four years at the time of his death in No-
vember, 1908. This was largely because of the banyan-
like shade of the skilful but hated Empress Dowager Tse
Hsi, the patron priestess of the Boxer movement, whose
ability was so exceptional, especially in intrigue, that she
far outranked Catherine and Elizabeth, and some dared
to call her a Jezebel. She was the virtual proprietress
of all the pawnshops of Peking. When the Emperor
was physically weakened and with no hopes of recovery,
decrees in 1906 began to bear the superscription " Their
Majesties," so as to allay some of the criticism. Petti-
coat politics (to be exact it is trousered politics where
women are concerned in China) might appropriate pres-
ents to the throne, as under the Dowager they over-
rode the rights of the ministers, but the Chinese
far and wide love the office of even a Manchu
emperor sufficiently for every guild at New Year's
time (in February) voluntarily to send gorgeous
gifts to his Majesty, whose personal name of Tsai Tien
was veiled in his poetic title which meant " Illustrious
Succession."

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 211

It is to be regretted that at the intriguing and inhuman
instigations of the late ambitious Dowager, Kwang Su
was drugged and shelved during his formative and clos-
ing years, for the hearts of the people, in a land where
men are considered alone interested in public affairs, called
for a strong, male crown head, instead of the comet-like
ascendancy of this effeminate or unscrupulous viceroy and
now that one, or one eunuch or another, who might at the
time flatter the queenly ear. Among the students, who
were trained in Japan, is swelling the longing to cry for
a purpose " Lo Wan Him" (Hail the victorious leader
of a myriad of men,) of course preferably a Ming and
not a Manchu, if the change were convenient. Kwang
Su was married to his first cousin, who was older than
he. She is a woman of ability and refinement, and
more typically Chinese than the late Dowager. Poor
Kwang Su was a slight, sallow king; in height not
a Manchu; mysteriously contemplative; by nature im-
pulsive when he saw the right ; when withstood, sulky
instead of determined and patient ; a reader ; the most
Buddhistic looking man in his empire; punctilious in
sacrifices and ceremonies ; fitter perhaps for a temple than
a throne ; in short another " Edward the Confessor," lov-
able enough. The changes appointing Kwang Su's
brother, Prince Chun, as Regent, and Chun's son Pu Yi,
renamed Hsuan-Tung (Proclaimed Succession) as infant
Emperor of three years of age, only corroborate the
power that was wielded by their creator, the late Dow-
ager Tse Hsi. We in Hong-Kong in 1901 closely ob-
served Chun, then eighteen, when he was upon an apolo-
getic mission to Berlin. He is now twenty-five years of
age. His real name is Tsai Feng. He has not the cul-
ture nor the humanitarian refinement of his brother, but

212 THE CHINESE

he has more experience, force and health; is wider
traveled, and he is unhampered by the old intriguer and
plotter, and her cabal of eunuchs. The Manchu Tsing
dynasty therefore still sits in the saddle, but not so stead-
ily as of yore, for it is bickering with the Chinese ap-
pointees, as in the dismissal of Yuan Shi K'ai.

The Chinese in the south and center of the empire re-
sent another infant Emperor and another regency. How-
ever the ministry is stronger and more enlightened than it
ever was. The path before reform is wider than in the
past, and the fruit of to-day, let it be now recorded, was
the seed sown by Kwang Su in his liberal and courageous
edicts of 1897. It was the only famous thing he did, un-
less it be more famous to be a martyr to his own courage,
for it was owing to those edicts that the Dowager and her
cabal persecuted him for eleven years unto his death.
China's great future will largely be founded upon these
edicts, and therefore the unfortunate Kwang Su's name
will not be lost as though " writ in water." At all pre-
fectural cities once a year, the officials, gathered at the
temples just before daybreak, place a tablet bearing the
Emperor's name between Buddha's feet, and kowtow nine
times nine.

The Chinese are not only capable of national enthu-
siasm but have already experienced one type of it. I
refer to classical examinations, where from village to
hamlet, and from court to remotest district, the nation has
acted from immemorial years in one spirit to one end.
This is a unification Japan never experienced in the
preparation for her great upheaval. Given a more virile
subject to be presented to the people than the book lore of
Confucius and Mencius, the government is quite equipped
to make it permeate into the last recess, with of course

,*-»

- £**!wa&5oi.o«o*oir .

•'^VictorUi (fir-)
^ -y, '"Luppa

iUs'"

CHINESE EMPIRE

SCALE OF MILES

: Double-trick Ra,lwans In operation, 1909
.Single-track Railuniys In operation, 1909
. Railway Conditions in effect in 1909

\

L.L-PC«T£S £N6J'« COJ«.T

112 Greenwich 116

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 213

results that will surprise the race itself and shake the
world.

That public spirit is growing in China may be judged
by one of the Tsou Ku (invite subscriptions) meetings of
the guilds of Canton and districts which Chum called at
the Wan Shao Kung, or Imperial Presence Temple, to
decide whether the first funds for the Yuet Han Railway
(Canton to Han-kau) should be raised by taxation
throughout the provinces crossed by the line, or by sub-
scriptions among the Canton guilds. Two of the
seventy-two guilds subscribed five hundred thousand dol-
lars on the spot, and promised one and one-half millions
in the immediate future. This is the first time Chinese
have held what was practically a business Witenagemote
and it would not have been possible now, had not the boy-
cotts unified the guilds, and brought them over to the New
China party's ambitions. While the meeting was in prog-
ress, a rich Chinaman named Lai Kwai Pui, who was in-
carcerated for a political offense, sent word from the
prison that he would subscribe for fifty thousand shares.
Redivivus, the spirit of Eliot breathing from the tower!
No race responds more readily to appeals for subscrip-
tions in humanitarian causes. Voluntarily the Chinese of
San Francisco, themselves afflicted by earthquake and
ruin, cabled ten thousand dollars to the sufferers by the
Hong-Kong typhoon of September, 1906. The shares
of the Yuet Han Railway are for three dollars, so as to
be within the means of the poorest. When this railway
called for tenders for certain cars, a foreign firm was suc-
cessful. It was proposed by the latter that the contract
should be signed at the consul's office, as had been the
invariable custom, but Chau Kung Ying, the manager
of the railway, stated that the agreement must be drawn

214 THE CHINESE

up in Chinese, and signed at the railway company's office
in Canton. This marks an epoch in the commercial rela-
tions between China and the nations.

The constitution of Canton's business community may
be judged by the inclusion of the following: " Guild of
the Nine Hospitals"; "Pawnshops Guild" and "The
Smaller Pawnshops Guild." In the Emperor's decrees
in the Peking Gazette concerning the railway, the
" Nine Charities " take precedence of all other guilds in
the enumeration. Again think of a share-holders' meet-
ing attended by thirty thousand people at the governor's
Yamen. For the adjourned meeting there this character-
istic proclamation was issued : " We respectfully ask the
Merchant Guilds, the Charitable Institutions, and the
deputies to assemble. All gentlemen are asked to bring
their personal jade seals in order that the regulations
may be signed, and to state their age, dwelling and occu-
pation." The most popular guild at Canton is the Car-
penters', whose Lu Pan procession is the finest given by
the guilds. Clan and guild opinion have been developed
as in no country. What has been lacking in the nation
in the past has been the newspaper, with its facilities of
propaganda. The hundreds of thousands of those who
have secured the lower literary degrees, and the millions
of those who have been unsuccessful in the examinations
but who are widely read in the classics, have created a
conservative body, influential among the illiterate in up-
lifting the nation, and on the other hand, they stand as
a restraint against the possible oppression of the throne
and ministers, which latter body, coming from their num-
ber, fears their criticism.

Following these demonstrations of the boycott at the
Hoy Toi Monastery (mark you,) and the railway, came

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 215

a third and a fourth. When the commissioners on repre-
sentative government returned from abroad, the students
and guilds made the streets echo with their shouts of wel-
come and approval. Now it is parades deriding opium.
Banners are carried, showing pictures of the misery in-
troduced by the foreign drug. White ribbons with blue
inscriptions are worn on the hats. The opium dens are
visited by these Chinese 'Cromwellians, and the stupefied
victims are jeered. I once saw a long procession sweep
around the Canton Bund. The students were dressed in
white, and threw into the crowds leaflets reading:
" China, wake up, cure yourself of opium, and take your
right position among the powers." This is the first fruits
of the new schools. The Japanese teachers have struck
in this something practical and concrete. The procession
was led by a boy whose skin was dyed brown and who
was masquerading in a red turban, and an immense
opium pipe, as a Hindoo. Most of the banners were
white, to signify the death-dealing drug which was
brought first from India.

Another indication of public spirit was noticeable at
Amoy in August last. It was the Emperor's birthday.
The native shops were decorated with the Imperial drag-
on flags, festoons of flowers and branches of shrubs.
Never before has the national flag been so conspicuous
and popular in one of their own ports.

It must not be concluded that the many advances
shown by China are altogether creditable to the students,
who have returned from Japanese colleges. The railway
policy was conceived and carried through by the gentry
and merchants, before the foreign educated students were
numerous. The students are fire-crackers in the flame,
and add eclat to the demonstration, but the steady fuel

216 THE CHINESE

and heat are furnished by the conservative element, which
is the seriousness of it for those who shall make light
of it. In August last, the Canton Municipality decided
to inaugurate the Hong-Kong custom of registering chair
coolies (the streets are too narrow for 'rickishas). Four
hundred coolies gathered at the Hoi Tong Chee Temple
on the Honam side of the river, to protest against the tax
and tariff. The meeting was an exceedingly lively one,
and it can not now be said that a Chinaman can not think
on his feet. It is not the same sleepy, satisfied Canton.
These things never occurred before, and they will not
stop, in greater causes, now. The flames of rebellion
could be stamped out in the Kwangs and the central
provinces perhaps with the aid of the present railways,
but it might be a different thing if Yunnan, which is
poorly policed, should catch this spirit of protest, and
have time to start the furnace roaring.

A great deal of amusement has been afforded the na-
tions by the vanity of the Chinese in their dealings with
foreigners who have sought them, since the settlement of
the colony of Macao by the Portuguese in 1557, in the
middle of the Ming dynasty. They have long assumed
that theirs was the Hub kingdom, and that others were
merely satellites. They called their king " the Son of
Heaven," and demanded that European embassies should
proceed under yellow banners bearing the motto, "Tsin
Kong" (tribute bearers). There is however much in
fact to support China's pride ; that during the longest his-
tory of any race, she has taught various civilizations
around her letters, arts, and sciences, and has preserved
them from Sikh, Vandal and Slav. She gave birth to
Japan, and threw that people safely into a glorious orbit
of its own, the heat of which now is reciprocally warming

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 217

a new spring into being, as it swings near its parent orb.
She has maintained immemorially the security of her
southern valleys from invasion, and her culture uncon-
taminated during a period when southern Europe has
known countless obliterations and denudations, intellec-
tually and ethnically. Flood and famine have visited her
more cruelly than any race has suffered, but to-day she
points to her four hundred millions as a testimony that
she has abhorred the murder of war, and in deeds, if not
in letters, has practised the sacred teachings of the Occi-
dent's " Son of Heaven," while we have lusted after
slaughter, so that none of us of any blood can show more
than a tenth of her population.

Very interesting divisions of the Chinese race are
illustrated on the island of Hong-Kong and at Kowloon,
one mile opposite on the mainland, these divisions num-
bering throughout the nation, sixty millions each. For
instance, the women of the Hakka race, some of whom
can be seen employed breaking stones on the military
roads, wear broad hats fringed with a flapping veil, and
immense rings in their ears. They do not bind their feet,
or wear prominent nose ornaments. They are not so old
a race as the abler Cantonese, and other Pun Tei
(ancient) races of Kwangtung, and Szechuen Provin-
ces. Sometimes they are called Highlanders, especially
in Kwangtung Province, where they never succeeded in
dispossessing the plains people. They, of course, have a
dialect of their own. If one hears two boat-women
screaming ancestral anathemas up and down the gamut,
from legendary grandparent to tenth cousin, at each other
from their respective tillers, you may be sure they are of
the Hakka, or " Guests " tribe. They are the highest
tempered and most argumentative of the Chinese. They

218 THE CHINESE

largely compose the armies of the viceroys, and are re-
sponsible for most of the rebellions of the last two hun-
dred years. A large proportion of the emigrants to the
Straits Settlements are Hakkas. They are not so in-
sistent about marrying within their race as other Chinese.
Those who emigrated to Formosa married the wild hill
women, and incidentally drove the brothers of their wives
out of the camphor business. At Singapore they marry
Malays, and at Honolulu, Kanakas (as in the case of the
famous Ah Fong family there,) and in New York may
we say they are credited with offering themselves to ex-
patriated Hibernians! The bloody Taeping rebellion
was led by a Hakka from the vicinity of Canton, named
Hung Siu Tsuen.

During the water famine in August, the government of
Hong-Kong turns the taps on for only an hour. I have
seen Hakka bands from different streets approaching
with their pails or Standard Oil tins, dangling from stout
bamboos. A fight easily ensued over the precedence in
drawing. When the home gang was worsted, their
women retreated to the gardens on the house tops and
threw flower pots on the invaders, who charged repeated-
ly up the dizzy stairs, until the Sikh police, and mush-
room-capped native htkongs came up on the double. It
is noticeable in these rows that the Hakkas never cry
"help" or "murder," but "save life." The Hakkas
are more settled in the land than in former times, and re-
cent disturbances have occurred mostly among the Sang
Miaotzes (unsubdued children of the soil,) likewise a
roving tribe who have forced their way into Mongolia,
Szechuen, Yunnan, Kwei Chau, and the mountains of
Hainan Island. In their own dialect this race is called
Ba Bu Ren. The great general and Viceroy Ts'en,

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 219

who crushed the bloody Mohammedan rebellion of Yun-
nan, and who incognito would cut rebels down himself,
was a Miaotze aboriginal of Kwang-si Province. " As
sulky as a Lolo," is a proverb referring to a trait of a wild
tribe of the mountains of Szechuen, who declare that
happiness consists in being let alone. This race acquired
its name in its days of wandering, for " lolo " is a bam-
boo basket in which they-carry everything, from ancestral
tablets to knives for avenging their honor. Among the
lu aboriginal tribes, those Ishmaelites of the mountains
of Kwang-si and Che-kiang, you will notice that queues
are not worn. The hair is bunched on the head, and
beards are not shaved. The women are large footed.
All these races are fragments of the rule of the great
Genghis, and to a similar leader the Nomadic Tartars and
Mongols would again respond.

The people of Szechuen Province are short and
stocky; those of Shan-tung tall and bony, while the lithe
Kwangtung men are notable for their vivacity and well-
fed sleekness. The Tartar of the north is paler than the
bronzed Cantonese of the south. If you believe in the
aphorism that the land, and not the politics, makes a
people, come to China and see it exemplified. The Chi-
nese have emphatically assimilated certain families of
European blood. To recite three instances. At Macao
in the south, the descendants of the original one thousand
families, while retaining their Portuguese names and re-
ligion, are now nearly all Chinese by blood through inter-
marriage. At Kaifong in the central provinces, a colony
of Jews has lost names as well as religion, and near
Peking are the names, but little of the blood, of the fam-
ilies of the Russian prisoners who were captured at Al-
bazin in the time of Peter the Great, and who were first

THE CHINESE

corralled in the famous " Russian House " at Peking.

While nearly all the emigrations to America, Singa-
pore and the Philippines have been from Canton in the
south, it is remarkable that the emigration to Africa, re-
cruiting for which ceased in November, 1906, was from
Shan-tung in the north, where the coolies are taller and
handsomer, but not so intellectual as the Southern China-
man, who has more of the aboriginal Highlander blood
in his veins. Behind all the new counters in the bazaars
of Chemulpo and Mukden, stands the Chinese emigrant,
with the business future of those countries largely within
his power.

The honor of the Chinese has seldom received a more
significant tribute than in the arrangement for foremen
over the laborers in the Rand, and wherever large gangs
of Chinese have been employed. Among the Huns in
the coal mines ; Italians in street work ; and our own peo-
ple in building, there is no gang of laborers larger than
a dozen under one foreman. When Chinese are em-
ployed, a contractor estimates one foreman for every one
hundred men. Give this race a task which they can
comprehend, and the sense of duty appeals to them as to
no other people. It is the exclusion of Chinese labor
which has retarded the progress of the Philippines. Jap-
anese labor prefers other fields to the enervating tropics,
although a limited number of Japanese are permitted to
land in the Philippines, where they become 'rickisha cool-
ies. The soil under such amorous suns yields too
abundantly to compel the Filipino to arouse himself.
The Chinaman, whether from the hot Kwang and Fu-
kien Provinces or from cooler Shan-tung, works like a
beaver in the tropics. He is reclaiming Siam, Java and
Malay, and if he were permitted he would create of

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 221

Luzon, Mindinao and Panay the most luxuriant garden
of sorghum, hemp, cocoanut, banana, and mahogany
that the world has ever seen. Nothing will ever be made
of the Filipino, and schools will be wasted upon him, as
they have been upon the " ignorantly read " Bengalese,
who spouts dangerously and ungratefully of home rule,
because sedition and a little learning easily run to adjec-
tives. Sheer need would ultimately compel the Filipino
to follow the example of the Chinaman, when the emi-
gration of the latter could be stopped, until such time as
the native backslid from his acquired ways of industry.
In all the world, — Kaffir, Somali Arab, Mexican peon
or government-rationed Indian, — there is nothing that
can wear the folds of determined laziness, without creas-
ing them, so long as the Filipino. A stalwart friend of
Chinese emigration from an educational standpoint, was
Secretary Seward. As the returning emigrants are en-
riching Italy, so the Chinese emigrant brings modern en-
lightenment back to his native land.

Here is an interesting tale of the emigrants for a
Chinese Boccaccio, and one quite unusual for China
where women are seldom faithless. Outside the vil-
lage of Fatshan only a day's walk from Canton, in
an ancestral, tiled, stone farm-house, where a brake of
millet stalks whispered peace from generation to gen-
eration, lived a patriarch alone with his young daughter-
in-law. The son was absent in America, where a
Chinese wife might not follow him according to our
law. Regularly the old man came in to Canton and
stayed with a friend until the Han-kau, with an eye for
" good josh " painted on its paddle wheel, sailed in the
morning for Hong-Kong. The next day he went to the
Hong-Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, sur-

222 THE CHINESE

rounded palatially with royal palms on Queens Road
Central, to cash a draft from his son, and with so great
a fortune to support himself, he retraced his steps to the
Fatshan, which sailed in the evening. From Canton
he started out, between the rice fields and duck farms, on
his joyful tramp homeward, where the " Comfort of
His Age," his daughter, awaited him. Alas! The in-
auspicious shade of the papaw seemed to lie long upon
the threshold. A Lothario came upon the scene in the
person of a farm-hand, seeking work under an alias that
frightened the old man, for it was not a clan name. The
daughter-in-law fatefully interposed, and the worker was
given the petsai field to till. Being a married woman, the
daughter also aided in the field. Shortly an elopement
was planned, and fortunately wits rather than murder
were used to secure the four hundred dollars, which the
old man had saved. Paper, ink-stick and brush were se-
cured, and the absent husband's white-wood " chop " was
resurrected from the camphor-wood chest. Chinese char-
acters are easily forged. A letter from the son was pre-
pared, begging the fond father to give money to the
daughter to go to America to join her husband. She
should come if possible with some clansman who was
emigrating, and with whom he could communicate at Vic-
toria regarding a plan which he had for circumventing
the Exclusion law. The old man stepped into the trap;
the farm-hand had always been desirous of emigrating.
For his kindness in the dilemma, the old man would ad-
vance him the remainder of his funds. The three arrived
at Hong-Kong. The sea was of course too rough for age
to take the sampan trip to the great ship which lay like a
black dragon cumbrous on the stream. Tears and good-
byes were exchanged on the Wing Lok wharf. The

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 223

usual shouts of shao (long life) and fuh (happiness)
were wafted to the rapidly receding boat. The shameless
plotters took a devious course, and re-landed in Hong-
Kong, much to the amusement of the boatmen who said
they were ying (mad). The patriarch went home, and
shortly afterward received a genuine letter from his son,
stating that he was about to return home, and requesting
his dearly beloved, the Pearl of Fidelity, to meet him at
Hong-Kong on the ship's arrival. Father and son met
at Hong-Kong, and with the clan ire mutually inflamed
sought the culprits. The native boarding-houses on El-
gin Street, which have harbored so many secrets, at
length gave up this comedy to the courts, and that is why
Wong Chik, alias Cheung Yam, won't bother the Cheung
clan any more; nor will the grocery that he was about to
open on Rua da Se in Macao deal in credits, opium and
rice for a long while. What became of the woman, not
all China can reveal, unless the Cheung clan will some-
time be willing to tell; the millet is still whispering se-
crecy around the old stone homestead when father and
son talk.

We hear much of the Great Wall, certainly the world's
most memorable sight, but that other peculiar defensive
work of the Manchus, the Willow Palisade, now in poor
repair, which begins where the Great Wall ends at Shan
Hai Quan at the sea, and sweeps around the sacred tombs
of Mukden to the sea again, has attracted less research
than its uniqueness merited. The best preserved and
grandest city wall in China, encircles the city of Tsian
Fu, the capital of Shensi, which province was the cradle
of the race. The wall was built in the fourteenth cen-
tury, and is seventy feet in height. The towers are not-
able, which can not be said of Peking's ugly towers.

224 THE CHINESE

China's navy is divided into the Pei Yang and Nan
Yang, or northern and southern fleets, and also the Cus-
toms Cutter service, which includes the Lighthouse fleet.
The Chun Chih (War Board) is congratulating itself
that China is not without a naval reserve trained at the
expense of its critics, for every American, British and
German mail and tramp ship, which plies from her ports
across the Pacific, or Indian and Red Seas, is entirely
manned with a Chinese crew. The capable Yuan Shi
K'ai, renowned already for his ambitions for the army,
was until his recent dismissal drilling the nucleus for two
navies, which since the war with Japan have been used
chiefly as arms of the Customs service. The bases for
this navy are Changchew and Miao-tao Islands to protect
the gulf of Pechili and Peking; Chusan to guard the ap-
proach to the Yangtze Kiang and Shanghai; and Hai-
nan, to protect the south, and be within call of Canton.
He proposed first to make China great commercially, to
have an unexcelled army of half a million within five
years, and then to build a modern navy when his people
called for that final flourish of patriotism. The Customs
receipts and Robert Hart's new systematization of taxa-
tion taken up by Robert Bredon are to provide the money.

As Japan by edict and example is endeavoring to im-
prove the stature of the race by inducing the children
and women to sit on chairs instead of squatting on mats,
the viceroys are founding throughout China, Tientsin
Hui or Mutual Feet Societies and encouraged by the
Regent and the scientific Japanese, as well as our own
missionaries, the movement is spreading. It can affect
only the rich and the apish among the middle class, as
the poor and all of the Hakka tribes never bound the
feet. No candidates are now taken into the Civil Service

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 225

whose wives or daughters practise the custom. The
Board of Education has stepped in with an edict pro-
hibiting the manufacture of small shoes for the kin
lien, or golden lilies, as bound feet are called. The
traveled Chinese are quite argumentative that disgust-
ing as binding the feet is, it can not affect the health of
offspring as does the western custom of lacing, nor has it
ever affected so large a proportion of the population as
has the western distortion. Moreover, the Chinese reply
that the binding of feet has no voluptuous motive of re-
vealing the lines of the figure, which in their women
rather they conceal, even to the extent of binding the
breasts down, and they are accordingly insistent regard-
ing their superior personal purity. In this argument
between Paris and Peking, the impartial probably must
regret that the third party eligible to judge, the Atnah
Indians of British Columbia, who bound their heads,
has passed into oblivion.

On approaching Shanghai on the broad yellow flood
of the Huang Phu, one wonders if this can really be the
threshold of crowded China, for not a soul or a hut is
to be seen in the brakes along the shore. The low
flooded fields east of the Huang Phu are impossible of
cultivation until modern engineering skill wades in and
saves the sunken but extremely fertile meadows. Bile-
like and unpromising is the approach to Taku, on
whose flat shore a few thin birches and willows fail to
relieve the scene. But in the south is the grandeur
which one expected of the north, making the coast-line
just the opposite in appearance of America's eastern
shore. Particularly stern is the landscape of much of the
eastern part of the province of Kwangtung. The Hakka
grass-cutters have burned everything, excepting a few

226 THE CHINESE

firs of ten years' growth, which the British have sowed
on the granite hills of Kowloon. The houses are of
granite blocks, and are thatched or tiled, in comparison
with the bluish brick huts of Shan-tung Province. In
contrast, think of the mud hovels of Mohammedan Kansu
Province and of Pechili, or the cliff dwellings of Shensi
Province, or even the bamboo and thatch huts of Sze-
chuen Province.

Here and there a person of artistic soul, or a monk,
will have protected a wide banyan, whose branches lean
like a bowed patriarch upon many rooted canes. Some-
times a wind-break has been preserved of evergreen
orange and loquat, yellow syringas, or cotton-trees with
their large red flowers. Now and then you see a shining
green camphor-tree among the rain-smoothed rocks.
Where it is not tapped too often, this tree grows to a
magnificent size. The wood is in great demand in the
extensive pawnshop towers of the southern provinces,
where it is used to make trunks for clothes. The odor
is a powerful defense against the attacks of moths and
white ants. The wood is a golden yellow, clouded with
one wide brown vein, and when polished is silky smooth
and gorgeous enough for even the exactions of an ori-
ental connoisseur. Because of the dark vein, the wood
is not used for carving, but at Ningpo they find a white
wood which holds the knife well and takes a polish. In
the northern provinces the familiar ailantus tree, willow,
and roseate rhododendron are frequently seen, and in the
valleys of Che-kiang Province the deep green leaves of
the arbor-vitae cast shadows over the pale green rice
patches. In Korea the ranges remind you of turbulent
Atlantic seas, suddenly fixed in stone. All coastal south
China and western Szechuen are an array of white gran-

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 227

ite peaks, the oldest formation of the country. Indeed,
three hundred thousand square miles of China consist of
lofty ranges. Can any land, which at the same time sup-
ports a vast population, so boast of affording her toilers
the uplift of stupendous scenery, when labors are laid
down, and the eyes of the worker raised above the toil at
his feet ? These are they who work indeed as in the sight
of God. In most of the foot-hills are cut the horseshoe
shaped and blue-painted graves of the wealthier Chinese,
many of which graves ancestor worship and clan organ-
ization have preserved to ages hoary in comparison with
our oldest monuments. " The dead must see farthest,"
is a Chinese saying, when they explain these scenic loca-
tions.

In every valley of Kwangtung, hid behind barricades
of palest green, brown-plumed millet (kaoling), tufted
muk-kwa (papaw), or needlewood fir-trees are huddled
the low stone houses of the villagers, that they may be
near their rice swamps, and shan-yn (sweet potato) ter-
races. The women who do not have to work, are dressed
in colors which rival the flowers about them for bright-
ness, and it is from nature altogether that they have taken
their styles of color and ornamentation. You will notice
that the rice is not sown broadcast and harrowed into a
field, which is afterward flooded, as is our practice in
Louisiana ; it is transplanted into an already flooded field,
which custom leads to many skin diseases of the feet, and
to rheumatism, on account of the human fertilization
placed in the water. Over the tilled patches flutter show-
ers of white streamers, for the purpose of disturbing the
foraging magpies. More people live on rice than on
wheat in this world, so one can imagine the aggregate
acreage extending from Cape Cambodia to Shan-tung

228 THE CHINESE

Promontory. Fringing the rice swamps are bulrush shal-
lows, where the peasants gather a triple harvest of food,
fiber and down. The Chinese farmer only essays a few
acres, for that is all his machine-less toil can irrigate and
secure fertilizer (mostly human) for, and accordingly the
vast unreclaimed districts, even in so crowded a land,
are astonishing. In Ceylon, where the conditions were
the same until recently, the importation of German patent
fertilizers, made largely from Florida phosphate, has
greatly increased the area of productive land. With the
railroad era now really begun in China, we may expect
a similar transformation. In only two of the provinces
is irrigation not depended upon for the crops, i. e., at the
headwaters of the Yellow River in Kansu and Shensi.
The bamboo water-wheel, turned by the buffalo, is in
universal use in the country districts, and will not be
supplanted soon, though in some of the cities the mer-
chants are introducing foreign steam pumps for wells
and reservoirs. Where the village owns the water-wheel
and buffalo power, the toll of water diverted from the
main ditch is measured at so many marks of a joss-stick,
which is set burning.

The pig, the chow-dog, children and old women, alone
roam along the large flags of the streets of the small vil-
lages during the day, while in the distance the peasants,
dressed in blue Nankeen knickerbockers, toil with bare
sweating shoulders at the tank-sweep and bamboo wheel,
in their primitive irrigation and abominable fertiliza-
tion methods. The oriental sun burns up all
shadows, except the violet silhouette of the tall
pawnshop tower, the roof of which is heaped with
large stones, for ammunition against the attacks of
invaders. Here Cheong, and his wife Chai, have

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 229

their winter tunics in pawn, while they venture the
ten taet in a lease of neighbor Loong's six terraces (it
would not be lucky to choose four or seven), where
petsai, cotton, ramie, beans, maize, rice or sugar-cane
are sedulously cultivated. Or possibly he turns the land
into peanut patches for the sake of the fifty per cent,
yield of oil. When Cheong redeems the pledge, he not
infrequently secures a life mortgage of leprosy for him-
self. All land belongs to the government, and tenure
is evidenced more by the last tax receipt than the original
crown deed. Loong pays a tax of six cents a tnao, or
twenty-five cents our acre. If the pirates make a rush
from the banana and papaw brakes, the children on watch
start a chain of yells, which sets the village streets in
uproar and echo, and the men and women rush to the
fray from the fields with their two-pronged rice forks as
weapons. Sometimes an annoyed farmer's vengeance
is orientally extreme upon the foreigner who disturbs
his soil. Europeans tramping through the paddy fields
after the gorgeous colored and succulent rice-birds, or for
snipe, are, for a deterrent example, apprehended, and the
indispensable sun helmets, or Calcutta topics, are taken
from their heads at midday. There may not be a tree
or shade for miles, and the sun quickly prostrates the
victim.

China owes her vast population to her finesse in truck
farming. Nearly every family raises part of its food.
With machinery, draft animals, and the resultant fer-
tilizer, she can conquer wastes which will support even
double the present population. The present farms aver-
age two acres, and support eight persons. Where the
desert has encroached upon the land, and sifted a
blanket of sand over the soil, the peasants can be seen

230 THE CHINESE

cutting cellars so as to reach the fertile earth and till
it. On some of the towers of the Great Wall, hanging
gardens have been planted by the Tartar guards amid
scenery of mountain, pass, rivulet and cloud, with which
storied Babylon could only have been simple in com-
parison. In passing, we might remark that no woman
is allowed on the wall, as that would be a challenge to the
God of War, Kwan Ti.

The three provinces of Pechili, Shan-tung and Kiang-
su present scenes of waterways and small farms that are
richer in their beauties than even Holland's fertile bor-
ders. Theirs is that gentle beauty that warms the heart
the most, because it least touches the sublime and imagin-
ative. Everywhere the peach, plum and pear are in
bloom as of right royal, for this is their first home. The
golden Grand Canal, or Chah Ho (river of flood-gates)
flows through plain and village, to connect all things with
the Father of Life, the Yangtze River. The cribwork is
of stone, or of millet stalks, mud and cord, and miles of
the canal run above cities, which could be at the mercy of
the rebellious waters. Heavy stone bridges, with balus-
trades adorned with lions, dragons, monkey and elephant
heads, leap from the plain and over the canals, with that
mounting sweep which we thought was created in, but
was really stolen by Venice when Marco Polo whispered
in her ear. The arches are pointed, semicircular and
Omega shape. They really look more like picturesque
gateways that usher in the stream. Some are white, and
others are clothed in green and purple with bean vines
and convolvulus.

The Venice of China is Soochow, with one and one-
half million inhabitants, dozens of islands and hun-
dreds of canals, all bridged and walled in for ten miles

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 231

in circumference. Over the Wan Hsien stream, at its
junction with the Yangtze, is the famous single arch
bridge, pictured so often, which leaps from the bank
forty feet high. On the top of the arch is a three-storied
guard-house, with panels of white stucco and braces ex-
posed, the eaves of each story all curling gracefully, and
a decorated frieze under a fanciful roof. From your
boat in the stream you behold through the arch far away
a framed purple conical mount of Szechuen relieved
on the wide flaming West. At Fu-chau, over the Min,
until the flood of 1897, stood the famous Wan Sui Kiao
(Ten Thousand Ages) bridge, with its forty piers of
monolithic stone; its roadway of stone blocks forty feet
long and three feet thick, and its balustrade of stone
blocks forty feet long. Tiny shops used to line this
bridge, which was only fifteen feet wide. In its bridges,
gates, walls and pagodas of stone and tile, China boasts
of ruins worth going all the way to see them. Japan
has no ruins, for she built in wood. Military boat
bridges, some with earth and even brick roadways, are
in frequent use on the tidal rivers, and rope and chain
suspension bridges join the dizzy loess cliffs in Sze-
chuen.

Nearly every village and city of the plain prov-
inces is crossed with a tracery of glistening canals, most
of them beautifully pure from their stillness and the
absence of manufacturing, in contrast with the swifter
rivers which hold the yellow loess in suspension.
Through every field of palest green, such as only the rice
blade can display, flows the empurpled flood in joyous
contrast of color. Innumerable high-pooped boats are
poled along, and as their sails, which are stretched upon
twenty bamboo battens, are not taken down when the

232 THE CHINESE

wind falls, they become lit up with every shade of
brown, red and gold upon their oblong surfaces in the
hushed sunset time. The hulls of the boats are hid
by the rice and sorghum, and the moving sails, especially
near Soochow, remind one of the Norfolk (England)
Broads, or the Hackensack Meadows, only this scene is
the finer and more animated. One of these junks, the
Wang Ho, lately crossed the Pacific to San Diego in
seventy days, and is the first to fly the Chinese flag in
American waters in historic times, though the Chinese
have legends of the Pacific being crossed. There is no
place in the world where you can see so many sails to-
gether as on the Hung Tsih Lake on the Yellow River.
Scattered everywhere, far away, human beings are hur-
rying noiselessly, and before each is thrown the shadow
of a cross. In the center an enormous flat grass hat,
made in Hupeh, hides the face, and at the ends of a long
bamboo, borne on the shoulders, are two large buckets.
These features stand out prominently in the violet sil-
houettes of those who are for ever nailed to the tree of
bondage, but who have ever had the least to say of that
bondage, and the term of it.

Everything is done at a trot. Wherever there is a
spring of water near the paths, the country people erect
for the convenience of wayfarers, Tings of four posts, up-
holding a roof of thatch or tile to shade a cool stone
bench. There are few large forests, but sufficient sophoro
locust, willow, cypress and orange trees, artistically
placed, to contribute adornment and relief to the view,
and rising to heaven with their airy towers, are scores of
balconied pagodas, and monasteries with wide, sweeping
eaves. Heathen though it all is, the peace of God rests
over the scene more palpably than anywhere else in the

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 233

world. The noiselessness, the smokelessness, and the dis-
tance account for the impression. It is conspicuous that
there are no fences, one reason being that wood is unpro-
curable. When our traveler returns to America, you will
notice that he has brought his strange gods with him ; that
he is a wood and water worshiper. Let your faucet run,
and he will rise mechanically to turn it off. Injure a
tree and he will hunt a magistrate! Moreover, the bor-
ders between Chinese farms must work while they watch.
If they must be marked, mulberry trees are set out and
the leaves divided between the owners, or bamboos are
similarly planted.

Most of the rivers roll along like the Mississippi in a
steady flood. Only the Ciamu Nu and Mekong Rivers
of Yunnan have numerous great rapids, and answer in
that respect to the St. Lawrence, as they fall from the
Thibetan plateaus to the rice levels of the coastal prov-
inces. Roaring up Hang-chow Bay and the Tsien-tang
River as far as Hang-chow city, at ten knots an hour,
flows the world's most famous tide bore. The maximum
height of twenty feet is reached in March and August.
Tourists should behold the wonder at moonlight, as well
as daytime. It is an animating sight to see the heavy
junks turn their bows to meet the great wave, and then
wheel round and follow it to a new position on the bund
or wharf. What a commotion there is among the mat-
ting sails, all weighted with their bamboo battens, as they
batter their thin masts! The Yangtze has lesser rapids
in its upper reaches, and one long rapid, the Hsin Tan,
where it is one of the sights of the world to see three
hundred to four hundred men tugging a boat up-stream.
These tow-men live near the Red Life-Boat Station at the
foot of the rapids, in a dull cluster of brown huts. From

234 THE CHINESE

their work they stand as noble models for a Discobolus
of Myron as you could see anywhere. They pull high
up, with the bamboo hawser drawn over their shoulders,
and the tug comes upon biceps, shoulders and calves.
The government appeals to their esprit by offering re-
wards for lives rescued. Min is a favorite name for a
river, another well-known one being as far west as Sze-
chuen Province, where it empties into the Yangtze.
This Min River is famous for its high-prowed hurdling
boats, which are employed to slip over the smooth, large
stones of the rapids. The rush is tremendous. Another
peculiarity of these boats is the hinged sail, which at
night is let down over the boatman's family for a roof.
The only sails which they ever furl are the studding sails,
and these are the only boats of the Chinese which employ
studding sails.

In China, as in India, though there are vast moun-
tains, the topography is without plateaus to such an ex-
tent that there are no waterfalls, such as Niagara, Mont-
morenci, or the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi. Nor are
there great lakes, the Ting in Hunan, two hundred and
twenty miles in circumference, and the Po Yang in
Kiang-si, ninety by twenty miles, being the only ones
worth mentioning. Accordingly, when Gaekwar or
Viceroy come to America, their first rush is to see
Niagara and Superior. The Po Yang is studded with
beautiful islands, but the silt of the Kan River has
made the shores marshy. The scenery of the Tung Ting
Lake, and the eighteen rapids of the Kan, will only be one
and one-half days from Canton when the Canton-Han-
kau Railway is opened shortly. Only three days by camel
from Peking lies the least known portion of the globe,
Gobi Desert, one thousand miles square and four

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 235

thousand feet elevation, where men once lived and pros-
pered until the feuds of Mongol and Tartar left the gar-
dens to be sifted over with sand by the winds. Almost
undiscovered, China's great chains of mountains lie north
and west, with the tales still whispered about them of
mines which supplied Khans with their jewels, and which
will probably be found based to a great extent on fact
when Japanese engineers get the railways to the foot-
hills for the advance of prospectors.

The real dragon of China is the Yellow River or
Hoang-ho, but called by the more reflective, " China's
Sorrow." In one thousand years, he has drowned more
Chinese than all the wars of humankind have slain during
that period. His back is arched five hundred miles, as
he doubles on his course into Mongolia, and his tail
writhes here and there from changing banks for six
hundred miles, as he lashes into misery and death the
inhabitants of Honan and Shan-tung, who never know
when the new foundation for their moving huts will be
chosen for the path of their destroyer the following
spring. A less rapid river would deposit its loess higher
up its course, and thus fix its bank below, but here is a
suicidal river which silts up its mouth, and is eternally
strangling its middle body. What the suspended loess
looks like, every traveler who has taken the tender at
Woosung from his steamer to go to Shanghai, will re-
member; it makes the heart sick at once, for these are
not the blue or green waters of home. Any who have
lived at Peking or Tientsin know what the dust storms
of April are like, when the dry loess is caught up by
the winds that sweep down from the hills of Pechili.
The Orient sun glistening from every particle makes the
whole air scintillate with yellow flame. The loss to the

236 THE CHINESE

poor each year, through flood devastations, is five million
taels and ten thousand lives, and besides there is the im-
poverishment of the soil as the loam is sifted into the
sea. In the same manner, the Menam is scouring Siam
of its fertility. We have nothing at all comparable in
color to these rivers, excepting, perhaps, our arch-thief
of alluvial richness, the " Big Muddy " Missouri. What,
the loess, or kwang tu (yellow earth) can produce
with rain, is illustrated in Shensi, where three crops of
grain are brought forth each year. No fertilizers will
be needed for years in the northwestern provinces.
When one layer gives out, the loess cliffs can be pulled
down, and powdered over the worn-out land.

The Government is in a quandary how to bring relief
in the valley of the Hoang-ho. Even to the top of the
Sin Ling Mountains, in ancient times, the destroyers
climbed eleven thousand feet and chopped every tree all
the way up. Reforestation of the upper courses, to miti-
gate erosion of the yellow terraces, would produce no
results for a generation; neither would levees at the
mouth, on the Mississippi plan, work, owing to the ex-
filtration of the waters through the permeable bed of the
river. Reforestation would eventually hold back the
snows of the denuded hills of northeast Thibet and Mon-
golia, and the waters of the only rainy province, Kansu.
This would diminish the release of the tremendous spring
torrent and vast suspended cargo of loess, and provide a
steadier and longer flow, with some hope of the banks
being fixed long enough, first for binding by vines, and
for the later afforestation. It is the most awful lesson
in the world of the individual and national crime of
forest destruction, and the innocent descendants are pay-
ing ten thousand fold for the ignorance and sins of the

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 237

unscientific fathers. The first motto to be written in the
new Chinese copy-books should be : " He who chops a
tree without planting ten is a red dragon to his son, and
a white dragon to his son's son, and his grave shall be
unswept."

The Yangtze, although rising near the Yellow River,
with a greater fall of fifteen inches to the mile, carries
the bulk of its loess well out to sea, although it prob-
ably accumulates less loess than the Yellow River.
So strong in flood time and so shallow in the rainless
season is the current of the Yellow River in Mongolia;
of the Han and of the upper Yangtze that many
native boats make only one trip down-stream. They are
broken up for lumber at the end of the journey. China,
influenced by poorer Japan spending three millions a
year on a forestry policy, is now willing to spend mil-
lions for the control of the Yellow River, and the vastest
scheme of reforestation ever instituted by a government
may soon be put in operation. The reforestation will
probably be accomplished with the China fir (Cunning-
hamio sinensis), known in China as the " Sau Tsoi "
£t ^/f ; and the Pinus massoniana, both of which pro-
duce a commercial timber, the latter having the addi-
tional quality for the southern Orient, of withstanding
fairly well the insidious attacks of the white ant. Ger-
many found the hills of Tsing Tau barren, and in a few
years she has clothed them with a young forest, so that
an ancient mariner returning there \vould hardly know
his old bearings. Britain, the great preceptor, has set
forth the same object lesson on the twenty miles of
hilly territory between Mirs Bay and Chung Point, op-
posite Hong-Kong. There is a religious sect in Honan
the members of which preserve forests, and at their festi-

238 THE CHINESE

vals, which are observed at night, they hang lanterns
among the branches.

China could support even double her population if the
arid stretches, especially in the northern and western
provinces, were reclaimed by irrigation, and now that her
credit is improving, and her resources being developed,
these great works are sure to be advanced. More hemp
should be cultivated, and even in the rich plain of
Honan this important product is not developed as it
could be, and as the Ching Too men would work it.
They are the most scientific farmers of the race. What
the Chinese can execute in the way of dikes is well illus-
trated at Kai Fong, the capital of Honan, where the
great Yellow River has been turned from its uninterrupted
southern sweep of seven hundred miles. In the battles
of the Mings against the Manchus, these dikes were once
broken, and three hundred thousand inhabitants of the
capital drowned, but there were no newspapers then, and
the world has forgotten and forgiven. The Chinese are
not altogether unscientific; they so respected the first
engineer, Yu, who successfully diked the Yellow River,
that they called him to the throne. This was when the
nation was emerging from the pastoral to the agricultural
state, and admired and needed a Joseph instead of an
Abraham. If ten thousand square miles in Japan can
support forty-five million people; if the Mormon father
could turn deserted sage-brush Utah into a garden, the
Chinese without a national debt, can when they will con-
vert their northwest into valleys which will repeat the
story of the prolific Ching Too plain. Their coal lands
alone would be security enough for any dozen schemes
of irrigation, public utilities, naval, etc., that the gov-
ernment could conceive; and the surprises of modern in-

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 239

dustry and finance can easily occur in China almost any
year after the Canton to Han-kau portion of the north-
to-south Trunk Railway is completed. You will notice
where the new Peking-Han-kau Railway passes through
the sand plains, that the government has in a small way
begun its afforestation work by planting willows to pro-
tect the railway embankment from the winds. The same
improvement has been made on the North China Rail-
way, from Tientsin to Newchwang. The object lesson
was acquired when the Chinese commissioners looked
through the port-hole of a P. and O. liner, which was
passing through the Suez Canal, and beheld the sands of
El Giser fixed at last by the roots of Scotch shrubs.

Second as a devastator to the Hoang-ho is the Han
River, which rises higher than its width, and which
drowned only as late as June, 1906, ten thousand people,
and in April, 1908, five thousand people. The visitor in
Han-kau may notice in the autumn that the houses and
booths along the river bank are built on piles thirty feet
high. At Yching the waters of the gorge rise fifty feet.
This will tell all you may care to know of what the spring
flood is like. Confucius ranked as the fourth virtue the
cultivation of the mulberry tree, and we, the outer bar-
barians, have accordingly been dressed in finery from the
product of the worms which fed on the leaves thereof.
If he had enjoined upon his countrymen the plant-
ing of the camphor and the fir in the mountains of
the West, he would have saved in the last three centuries
alone the lives of ten millions of his race who have been
drowned, as the waters of the Hoang-ho and the Han
reared themselves forty feet above their banks. Because
of the floods in Kiang-sn in 1907, four hundred and fifty
thousand people had to be fed in concentration camps,

240 THE CHINESE

each averaging one thousand families. This is the first
time China organized against famine. The camps were
patrolled by the new draft of soldiers. Some features of
the camp life were amusing. Cheese was sent by the
Canadian government, but the unsophisticated people
preferred even grass to this new food. Only the Thibet-
ans have any knowledge of milk foods. In the relief
contributions, America headed the list for the first time
in charity accorded the Chinese, and attracted the favor-
able comments of the officials, who announced that they
would influence students to be sent to American institu-
tions. The absence of trees also causes the Hoang-ho
to drain itself too rapidly through its porous loess bed.
In the first six months of 1901 a drought which dried up
the crops of millet, mountain rice, corn and shanyue
(sweet potato), came upon Shensi Province. One third
of these most ancient people of China (three hundred
thousand) died before food could reach them, though
there was sufficient elsewhere in the land. Nothing can
prevent a recurrence, except a railway from Kaifong
direct westward to Tsianfu, four hundred miles, so that
supplies may be hurried in.

The Min River at Fu-chau, as scenic as the Gunnison
of Colorado, contrary to the general conditions in the
south, is rich in woods, which wave on cliffs seven hun-
dred feet above the waters. In a grove of gigantic
Liquidambar, oak and water plum (myrica rubra) stands
the famous monastery of Fong Kong Tse. Immense
quantities of paper are produced here, as the bamboo
grows in great luxuriance in the dank and shady gorges
of the Min. Fringing northern Mongolia is a region
one thousand six hundred miles long and three hundred
miles broad, where the giant firs curtain in an uninhabited

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 241

night, and to which fastnesses Genghis Khan, the Charle-
magne of the Mongols, once made his retreats. The
Kara and Tula Rivers have washed from the forest-
clothed sides of the hundred peaks of the Ulamgum and
Khangai ranges a dark loess called rine, out of which
the life has been far from lost, but there is not a soul
now to till it on steppe or in valley. It seems to have
stood since the time of Genghis Khan as a debated land
between Tartar and Mongol, Russ and Manchu.

Where the rice field is not the source of wealth, on
higher ground (for China is three-quarters mountains)
the mulberry growers' huts are grouped. Between the
trees, tobacco is planted as a second line of defense
against crop failure. The great drawback here is the
scarcity of fertilizers, for phosphates are as yet un-
mined. The mulberry trees are stunted to six feet in
height for eight years, after which the shoots and leaves
are cropped for the worms. If the terrace is near a
foreign settlement at a treaty port, Cheong adds a ruby
persimmon tree, a glorious pumoloe, a scarlet-blossomed
pomegranate, or a luscious lychee to his grove, which
latter explains why foreigners grow boils in China.

The province of Shansi has been neglected, but will
come into its own. It is that great loamy plateau of
three thousand five hundred feet altitude, buttressed by
granite hills, which have pushed the destroying Hoang-
ho five hundred miles from its course. Here at Ping
Ting are the beds which used to supply the camel pack
trains with coal for Peking. The colors in the great
loess ravines, four hundred feet deep,, are of all hues
and remind you of the canons of the Colorado.

There will be a day when Thibet will be the mountain
resort of the world. Travelers will take the swift Mes-

242 THE CHINESE

sageries Maritimes steamers, about twenty-two days in
the voyage from Marseilles to Tonquin; from Haiphong
they will take the French railway now building, and in
two days run up to the capital of Szechuen, Ching Too,
and from there enter a more hospitable Thibet than via
the Himalayan gateway. You will realize that your stay
can not be long the first time. Think of standing by the
toilers as they swing the sickle in the silvery light on
plateaus high as Pike's Peak, while as high again rise
the mountains that are the ridge pole of this, our mun-
dane habitation. How quickly the panting toilers work,
for all too soon comes the long winter, and the silence
far above the clamor of the nations at the foot-hills of the
world, — • Indian, Chinese, Caucasian.

China, too, has its Thousand Islands, scattered along
the rocky coast from Hong-Kong to the Gulf of Tonquin,
and a trip from Canton to the French concession at
Kwong Chou Bay is one of the most thrilling in the
country. So silent, majestic and apparently uninhabited
is the scene, that you would not believe you were at the
gates of the world's most populous country. The rocks
which are more seismic than volcanic, assume every shape
that the imagination can conceive, and rise purple above a
quiet yellow sea, which rims their base with one thin line
of white foam. These were the gates the Arabs came
to in unrecorded days long before Vasco da Gama and
Albuquerque, and with surprised dusky faces, peering
from under the long lateen sails, asked questions History
would now give a good deal to know, for we might like
to reset some mile-posts of Progress.

The voice that wins the wanderer back to the East,
the spirit ever calling, is the remembrance of the absence
there of smoke, noise and hurry. This is the peace of

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 243

Cathay : the promise that there ever is a to-morrow, and
never an enemy, and the charm of it never departs. Vast
valleys open up with ten thousand at work, from the
pagoda-topped hill where the golden ginko-tree, shaped
like an immense maiden-hair fern, drops its red fruit, to
the soft green paddy at your feet, and the loudest noise
ceases when your barrow's wheel stops creaking in its
wooden journal. Tombs, monasteries and hamlets stand
half-shaded by trees, and nowhere does smoke or steam
rise to soil the blue. A country it is, inhabited the
longest by man, yet looking the youngest, because its
breast has not been torn by mines, or the insult of chim-
neys been raised against the ever-vernal innocence of its
vales. The flora of all climes are mixed in its luxuriant
valleys. The rubber, apricot, peach, pumaloe, banyan,
arbor-vitae and fir trees blend their shades; and hemp,
honeysuckle, cotton, poppies, tobacco, maize and indigo
wave together.

The sailors of China, but not of Japan, still cling to
the use of the high-sterned junks. Without keels, these
drifters rely for their course on the deep, latticed rudder
which towers as high over the water as it sinks under
it. They are helpless, close-hauled, but off the wind, or
on the quarter, they make splendid passages. Chinese
waters present an exceedingly picturesque appearance
with these junks displaying tremendous oblong mainsails
of yellow and brown matting. They have no jibs, but
often carry a jigger mast. The old Amoy junks were
never launched without two tremendous wooden eyes be-
ing fastened on with wooden bolts, the purpose of which
the sailor explains in his Pidgin-English, " No eye, how
can see ? " The foreign steamboat most popular with
Chinese was the old Hankow of Hong-Kong, which dis-

244 THE CHINESE

played two great eyes upon her paddle boxes. The
Chinese commissioners were accordingly humored with
the Central of New Jersey ferry-boats on New York Bay,
which have a circular eye painted upon their funnels, and
the Erie Railroad ferry-boats, which bear the white
stripes of the battleships of Japan. It was a reminder
of the home, which, with all its oddities and supersti-
tions, is still the dearest place to them, despite their
widening experience in affairs. The Canton River junks
have a low bow, fore and mainsails, but no jib or jig-
ger, and from both mastheads they fly triangular red
dragon flags with many tails. In ancient days they hung
a red tablet over the rail amidships when they were con-
veying an ambassadorial mission, but in this case a
green instead of a red dragon flag was broken out aloft.
Most imposing of all, with their lofty carved sterns, are
the junks from Kiang-si Province. Until the Japanese
fleet whipped Kublai Khan's fleet despite the latter's use
of powder and cannon, these were the vessels which swept
the seas from Borneo and Hawaii to Japan and Korea.
Not only the Chinese navy has nailed up its romantic
honors, but in earlier days, in the reign of Chung Ti, A.
D., 80, Chinese armies marched in victory to the shores of
the Caspian, where the eagle of Rome and the dragon of
Cathay saluted and parted in mutual wonderment with-
out fight.

The worship of high places is prominent in the Chinese
religious system. On a given day once a year every
man, woman and child who is able, ascends the highest
peak in the district, dressed in the choice of the silky
wardrobe. It is the festival of long life which was as-
sured to a philosopher who was saved from a flood
thereby, and wrote that all his wisdom afterward came by

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 245

taking a survey once a year, of life from an exalted over-
look above his former haunts. It is at once a Thanksgiv-
ing, a Good Resolution and a Noah Anniversary day.
The Buddhists build their pagodas on the highest mounds,
and you will hear at even the welcome of the tiny bells
which are swung in the eaves by the wind. Every traveler
is familiar with the rambling granite monastery above the
fish pools at Macao, and where the alluvial rice fields
spread a green ocean of grain around a peak called oddly
" Lean Dog Mountain," which was once an island in the
delta of the Canton River, there rises another pagoda.
All the storied way across the province for two hundred
miles along the West River from Canton to Wuchow,
pagodas mark the view. At Han-kau, from the top of
Han- Yang Hill, a white temple signals across the broad
Yangtze's flood to the hundred-eaved Yellow Stork
tower. Outside Peking, one of the most beautiful of Chi-
nese pagodas, \vith its nine tiers, commands the view, and
one hundred miles farther, at the Emperor's vast country-
seat among the Ching Tih (hot river) Hills rises an elev-
en-story pagoda of alternating colored stories of yellow,
blue and green tiles. At Soochow rises an octagonal pa-
goda with nine stories and sixty doors, which open on airy
balconies that look over the violet bends of the Grand
Canal, as the oriental day deepens from dusty gold to
purple. On the summit of Kinshan Island, as you ap-
proach Shanghai in the early morn, rises another yellow
pagoda of renown.

Speaking of pagodas, and recalling history's curse on
destroyers and thieves of art, one can not but repeat the
fame of that gilt and white tower two hundred feet high,
and four hundred years old, of priceless porcelain, of the
Recompensing-Favor Monastery at Nanking, which the

246 THE CHINESE

frenzied and burlesque Christian Taepings destroyed
in 1853. Even now its one hundred and fifty tinkling
bells seem to sound for the dreamy traveler, from under
the green tiled roofs along the dreamy canal at even. A
few large golden tiles of this pagoda are among the treas-
ures of the pottery rooms of the Metropolitan Art Gal-
lery, New York. The most visited pagoda in China, and
the ugliest, is the " Five Story " one at Canton, built in the
fourteenth century, which is not round at all, but merely
an oblong building, with five verandas on one side, built
upon the Tartar wall. It is mendicant infested. The pa-
goda has no particular interest or history, but it gives the
best view of the city, and of the famous grave district ex-
tending up the White Cloud Hills, outside the walls. The
octagonal nine-story " Flowery Pagoda " at Canton, built
in the sixth century, is less known, but truly superb. The
proportions are chaste, and the cornices are not exagger-
ated. The yellow walls contrast with the darker roofs of
the stories. A square non-tapering pagoda, showing Bur-
mese influence in architecture, at Yunnan, has twelve
stories; the balconies all being unusual for narrowness.
It is the most ponderous pagoda in China. The best
proportioned square pagoda in the land is the seven-
storied one at Chu Siung. Its unique grace consists in
the height allowed from the ground before the first story
begins. Then there is another noted one outside Ychow,
the eaves of whose nine stories whisper a forest full of
Aeolian music, or maybe forbidden secrets about the
Tsing Emperors buried within its shadow. On Mount
Omi, in Szechuen, there is a temple which, partly because
of the difficulty of ascent, has acquired a name of pre-
eminent holiness. The temple is placed four thousand
feet up the twelve thousand foot mountain, and is reached

CHINA, POLITICAL AND PICTURESQUE 247

by ten thousand steps, which were cut in the solid rock
by pilgrims. Nothing more aptly reveals the unsatisfy-
ing portion of China's religion than these agonizing feats
prescribed for the faithful, in their efforts to find surcease
of inward unrest. In no land, under the exactions of no
religion, are the penances so terrible, or the efforts more
sincere, and therefore, if humankind is to be judged only
by motives in the Great Day, the Chinese will not be
found wanting.

Chinese architecture can readily be adapted to our
country. The house should be at least two stories high
with a cupola, to balance the parallel curves of the rising
cornices of the veranda. The heavy roofs with wide dec-
orated eaves, glistening tiles, and upward sweep of the
wide cornices, are infinitely grander, warmer and safer
looking in our mountains than the Swiss chalets, and the
plain surface of the walls can be sufficiently relieved in
summer with awnings, which contrast well with the pon-
derous effect of the roofs. Another advantage is that
every inch of space within the walls is available, as there
is nothing of the execrable gingercake style in anything
Chinese. German architects are fast ruining the appear-
ance of Japan with their architectural productions. For
summer homes anywhere, the Chinese style affords as no
other does opportunities for steps, terraces and veranda
posts, where potted plants in bright vases can be placed
against a dark colored house. The plain Chinese garden
which trusts more to the individual effects of flowers and
vases, will reach the heart quicker than the convention-
alities of Italian styles, which make you think the gar-
dens need a roof and are not for outdoors. Such a home
as I have described has been built by a New Orleans gen-
tleman, Raul Villon, and is worthy of wide imitation.

VI

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE

China ushers the visitor into her art life with delightful
surprise. From the bright wide streets, bordered with
tamarind trees, of Shameen, the island in the Pearl River,
where the foreigners dwell in English and French con-
cessions, to a crowded and dirty bund, over a shaky
camel's back bridge, you cross to Canton, the center of
the artistic production of the nation. In your blue-
curtained chair, borne on the bare shoulders of speeding
coolies, you swing along the damp, dark lanes which are
too narrow to permit a tree to root. The sewage rolls its
noisome tide in the single gutter in the middle of the
road. No Chinese street has side gutters. The large
square stones of the paving bear testimony to an eternity
of years by the deep hollows made by the passing of
countless bare feet. At last you come to a court where
three streets meet, and where the blackwood cutters
guild is located. The shops spread along Tai Sun, Yuck
Tsze, and Old Factory Streets. It is the sweetest spot
in all foul-smelling Canton. You enter the stone base-
ment and kick your way refreshingly through the fragrant
red teak-wood chips, for they are not yet stained the
familiar ebony. The men whom you observe carving
the legs of chairs will tell you their forefathers carved
here, too, when Cabot, Columbus and Da Gama were
only dreaming of discoveries. Once a leg carver or a
turner of panels, always one. In an adjoining shop, idol

248

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 249

carvers are working on images which will be covered
with gold leaf and placed before the incense pots of the
Tai Fat Tsze Monastery. If you desire a buffet with
shelves, lockers, mirror and Yunnan marble like the one
you are admiring, it will take Tack Loong and his sons
a year before they can deliver it. Kowtow to Tack, for
he is an artist who dreams and works while he dreams,
over the best product which his Family Academy can
evolve. His ancestors executed no better work for man-
darins in Kang He's day, when China, first hearing that
there was a " Ta Si Yang Kno " (great kingdom of the
Western Ocean; i. e., Portugal), declared " then it must
come and pay homage to the whole earth's Shang Ti
(Lord)." In the strength, permanence and pride of such
an assurance is rooted a real art spirit, and you behold its
flowers in these elaborate teapoys, chairs, screens, stands,
tables, and everything that the king of woods can be
worked into.

It is the same in Nganking, the capital of Nganwei,
with the horn lantern workers; once a lantern maker,
always one. Hang a silk net over the lantern, and you
have something opal-soft, but light and strong. Think
of the patience of artisans who work and stretch horn
in a moist heat until it is pliable enough for these de-
signs. It is the same story in Swatow, among the needle
workers who execute drawn-work; they are the descend-
ants of those who have been developing their art for
centuries.

Or wander along the Sun Tau Lan or the Hin Chan,
where you may find old turquoise-blue and gold vases of
the Yung Chin period which bring five thousand dollars.
Vases of the Ming dynasty are worth as high as ten thou-
sand dollars, and you will find one here if anywhere. A

250 THE CHINESE

pair of old Chinese large fmnille rose vases, enameled
with chrysanthemums, magnolias and cherries of the
Kien Lung period, like these you behold, have sold at
Christie's for four thousand dollars. A pair of square
Kang He vases, tapering in shape with famille verte dec-
oration on a black ground, has brought nineteen thousand
dollars; a pair of Ky Lin jars, twenty-nine hundred dol-
lars, and a pair of Kien Lung jars eighty-six hundred
dollars at Christie's in London, but the Chinese call this
extravagance on our part, an affectation in view of our
neglect of their present productions. The Manchu con-
querors have inspired the production of no porcelain equal
to .the product of the ancient potteries of the native Ming
kings of the fifth century, which answers to China's Au-
gustan age in art. The proportions of the royal ware
are fixed: base one-third, bowl one-third, and neck one-
third of the height. Even in these more or less decadent
days nothing changes in China: the lapis lazuli color of
Ming vases and the cobalt blue of the Kang He period are
the standards in judging the tones of modern productions.
Other vases, showing some ancient imported Greek influ-
ence perhaps, are of gourd shape, with a ground of pow-
dered blue, on which are set circular panels, the scrolls
being gold and the subjects enameled pylins, branches and
birds. Some of these unique vases bring as high as one
thousand dollars each.

The most famous Imperial pottery towns with a history
of one thousand years in the art, are inland, in Kiang-si
Province, and lie along the Kan River. Eastward from
Poyang Lake, about thirty miles up a deep valley, where
you would rather look for sooty coal, is King Teh Ching,
introduced to our verse by Longfellow. The population
of these pottery towns once ran as high as one hundred

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 251

thousand, all engaged in firing the ping-tu, or powdered
decomposed granite. When twilight deepens fast, you
will notice the flames of five hundred kilns brightening
into view in the darkening valleys. The fifty pound
bricks for the Great Wall, and the enormous yellow tiles
for the Nanking Pagoda, specimens of which you will find
at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, were fired here.
For miles along the shore of Poyang, the junks are load-
ing for ports three hundred miles away along the great
Yangtze River, there to distribute to mandarin and white
typan the treasures of Gold Medallion; Blue and White
Willow; brown water kongs with raised blue panels;
Nanking blue barrel-shaped garden seats ; brilliant White
Ting, the glaze of which you would marvel to learn was
produced with the ashes of ferns; pale bluish green Ju;
creamy white, trout-scale, crackled Kien Yiu; Tai cups
which are realistic water-lilies, the handle being a green
sepal; precious cerulean blue Yu Kwo Tien, whose tone
is the despair of Europe and broken bits of which are
carried about and set as jewels in China; highly colored
cinnabar, green and purple-brown Chun ware ; paper-thin
tea-green and scarlet Mandarin Kuan work with crab-
claw pattern ; sea-green and gull-gray Ko Yau ; Kang He
black vases; bright red Hsuan Te with insects rilievo;
Cheng Hua ware with life-like figures of fowl; jade
green and gold Tsang ware; and the celebrated beef-
blood Ming pottery, whose wavy lines of red are formed
by intermittent drafts of air being blown into the fur-
nace as the enamel bakes. Only a few of the vases with
rouge de fcr glaze and the mei tree with red blooms as
motif, exist; one priceless specimen being in the Metro-
politan Museum, New York City.

You will notice on old Chinese porcelain merely the

252 THE CHINESE

name of the reign. In contemporary output the factory
name is fired as " made at the Harmony Factory," " made
at the Myriad Peaks Monastery," but never the name of
the artist as is the Japanese custom old and new. How-
ever, tradition has brought down the name of the family
Lung as the most wonderful of the potters of the six-
teenth century. They took to the grave with them the
secret of their inimitable blood-red ware. Something of
praise must then be admitted of the only race which has
reached that artistic extinction of self -consciousness
where the workers are willing to forego their identity.

Porcelain is used for the facade of many of the temples
of' the Yangtze Valley, and the effect of the gorgeous
panels and relieved figures in the glistening white space,
together with the sun-bathed colored eaves, is more like
the shimmer of jewels than anything our architecture has
produced. The Hung Shek temple at Wuchow rises
with a perfectly plain wall above colored balustrades and
noble flights of steps, on which large vases are set. This
plainness is intentional, to give effect to the gorgeous
tiling of the towers and cornices. The Chinese is a pro-
founder artist than the Japanese, as he understands the
balance which exists between rich decoration and plain
surfaces. The fagade of the Temple of the Black God
in the city of Chow Tung in Yunnan is a solid gleam of
rich porcelains, but the effect is lost in the narrow street.
One-half of China's temples are thus miserably situated.

The famous cloisonee is made as follows. A copper
vase is secured and the design is etched thereon, thin
copper or gold wires being cemented on these lines. The
vase is then fired to anneal the wires. Colored vitreous
pastes of saltpetre, sandstone, oxides, lead salts and rice
water are dexterously filled in the interstices. The vase

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 253

is again baked. When cool, a file is applied, after which
the vase is again fired. Several polishes are now applied,
with limestone used on the lathe, and a polish with char-
coal follows. If gilt is to be applied, it is now done by
galvanic process, after which there is a final polishing
which reveals a work of enduring and enrapturing iri-
descence. In the firing of large roof and wall tiles and
solid shapes for mullions, sills, plinths, lozenged ventila-
tor vents, etc., the potters are as expert as any of our
artisans at Trenton or Liverpool, Ohio. Nothing is
built up from single bricks that can possibly be fired in
one piece.

The coolie and the fisherman however still eat off Han-
kau iron; camphor-wood deck or plaintain leaf. When
they, like any other labor in history, can afford to sit
before an earthenware plate and have the wherewithal
for renewals when it is broken, there may possibly not be
a Manchu on the Yellow Throne. For it is to be noticed
that when peasants are able to buy crockery they gener-
ally change their minds first and purchase swords to mend
their grievances, or retaliate upon those who kept them
serfs too long.

In meeting residents of the South and of the North, it
is noticeable that among the former the names are soft
and flowing, as compared with the sharp and hard names
of the North. In looks it is the opposite, the Southerner
having the high cheek-bones and harder face, and the
Northerner having the oval face. The Manchu is tinc-
tured with the severity of name and manner of the Mon-
golian and Korean, among which latter people you en-
counter names like Pak Sok. Compare the southern
Fung Kwang Chung with Jen Yuk Gko, or Min Yin with
the harsh Hok Ngon. The commonest family name in

254 THE CHINESE

China is Chang. It resembles the Smith family in
America.

In the ingrafting of American and European inventions
among her industries, especially at Han-kau, the Chinese
find themselves without means to name the strangers in
the arbitrary Wenli or mandarin written speech which
dates to B. C. 2500. As an instance the best they could
do with an incandescent light was to call it " new moon-
shine." .Wenli is the common speech of the masses only
in Honan and Shan-tung. As illustrating the slight dif-
ferences between the pronunciation of the mandarin
Wenli and the Cantonese, the word loh in the former is
sounded lok in the latter; and yu sha tsze in the
former is yau sha tsoi in the latter, which is not as
great a difference perhaps as " fo yee ol " of the Ken-
tuckian and " four year old " of the Yankee. There is
really only one language in all China, though so many
speak the provincial dialects that they have gained an un-
warranted reputation as separate languages. These dia-
lects, difficult both to the foreigner and the Chinese from
a remote part, have grown up from the isolation of the
provinces, as a germ center propagates when not dis-
turbed. It is not because there has not been sufficient
pride in the letter, for the Thibet monasteries outdo the
performance of the Hotel Rambouillet in a fine frenzy for
glossification and formula. Railways will have most to
do with the scattering of the dialects and will give the
Chinese that unification of speech and resultant dissemina-
tion of idea, which have been the main things (and not
the lack of Christianity or inventions) that have kept
them from moving forward as a very assertive body in
the world's polity.

The character or picture system is inadequate for law

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 255

or commercial writing, though it floods the mind in their
poetry with beautiful suggestions and with instant effect,
as compared with the considerable time before the eye
can glance along a batinized sentence, for instance. Into
the spoken or provincial dialects, especially in the south
(and Cantonese seems to be of greatest antiquity with its
soft musical sounds and flowing diphthongs as com-
pared with the gutturals of the Kansu dialect of the
North) have crept many phoneticized English words, and
English is likewise enriching herself with words formed
phonetically from the Chinese character. Historically,
the Chinese language, with all its boasted conservatism,
has already authority for this intrusion and enrichment,
for there are traces of Sanscrit words which were intro-
duced by the Buddhists. A neglected piece of Sanscrit
advice however in fever-stricken China is the following:
" Keep water in copper, and expose it to the sun, dip in
it seven times a bar of hot copper, and filter through char-
coal." On July Qth, last, at the parade of the new Chi-
nese Volunteer Corps along the Maloo at Shanghai, it
was remarked that Colonel Yu Ya Ching invariably gave
the word of command in English. It is to be noticed that
the Chinese are more anxious to learn English than we
are to learn Chinese. In my experience in Hong-Kong
we had a constant procession from the two Kwang Prov-
inces of punkah coolies, 'rickisha pullers, office boys, and
comprador's clerks, none staying longer than six months.
They were really students of English. When they
learned something of the language while being paid the
usual laborer's wage of five dollars a month, they re-
signed suddenly to blossom out at twenty dollars a month,
as consul's interpreters, clerks to ship's pursers, and in
their own Imperial Customs or importing Hongs. This

256 THE CHINESE

interest in the languages was not mutual. In twenty
years history of this Hong, with probably an aggregate of
three hundred staff employees, only one English speaking
clerk acquired Chinese, and it was Portuguese blood in
his veins which stimulated the linguistic interest. The
Chinese are determined to gain more from us than we are
from them. The telegraph blanks in use over China's
thirty thousand miles of wire are printed in English and
Chinese, and have been excellent primers throughout the
land in disseminating an interest in that one type of for-
eigner, the credit for which is due to the ablest business
man who ever came to China, the indefatigable Irishman,
Robert Hart, the head official, until his retirement re-
cently, of the Imperial Customs.

The dialect, or hang-tan, as in every country, is a tone
play on the written word, differing according to locality,
and the tone differences are most minutely drawn. They
are not insurmountable however, as is the belief abroad
concerning them and can be illustrated by the pronouncia-
tion of the name of the town in the Sunglo Hills of Ngan-
wei Province where the best ink is made. In the local
dialect it is Wei-Chow; in Cantonese, Fy-Chow. The
town on the Chang River which distributes porcelain, in
the local Kiang-si dialect is called Kau-Chow ; in Canton-
ese it is Jau-Chow. In the same manner, tea is called
ta at Nanking, and tai at Canton. The word for a vil-
lage headman in Nganwei Province is pronounced taipoa;
in Kwangtung Province it is taipan; in Singapore it is
towkay. The word for a tael called Hang at Shanghai is
pronounced Ian in Kansu Province, while the word for the
ten cash copper piece called fun at Hong-Kong, is pro-
nounced tun at Tientsin. The word mapoo (jockey) at
Seoul is pronounced mafoo at Hong-Kong, and mahong

257

at Yunnan. The name of the capital of the oldest prov-
ince of China, is pronounced by the Shensians themselves
C Irian, but a Kwangtung man would call it Tsian.
The whisky distilled from rice, which in northern Shensi
is pronounced somsliaw, is called samshui in most south-
ern Kwangtung ; som-jee-o in Pechili Province and chom
chum on the boarders of Yunnan and Tonquin. A for-
eigner, or literally a " foreign devil," is pronounced Hung
Kwei at Peking ; Yang Kwei in Kansu Province and Fung
Kivei at Canton, which invented1 the term. A head
helper, in charge of a gang, store or pack train, is called
futau in Yunnan Province and fokai in Kwangtung Prov-
ince. Pal, which means " white " at Peking, is pro-
nounced Pek at Amoy. The Goddess of Mercy called
Kun Yam at Canton is pronounced Kuan Yin at Tien-
tsin. Taotai which means city governor at Hong-Kong
is pronounced Tu-ti at Peking. In Mongolia the late
Emperor's name is pronounced Kang Si, while at Peking
it is Kwong Su. The Mongol word for wood is mo-don;
in Chinese mu-ton. Hung, which means " red " at Pe-
king is pronounced hong by the brilliant and independent
aborigines of Yunnan Province. The great iron Prov-
ince is called Hupei by the Pekingese and Hupeh by the
provincials themselves. The poet who wrote the Chinese
Raven ode, which suggested Poe's theme, is called Ki Yi
at Canton and Chi Yi at Peking. The word for river,
pronounced kiang in the Yangtze Provinces is called
giang in Yunnan. The monumental arches erected to
widows who did not remarry, are called pailou at Peking
and pailo at Canton. The numeral " one " is called ya
at Canton and ta at Peking. Jen, which means " men "
throughout China proper, is pronounced ren among the
aborigines of sequestered Hainan Island. The Korean

258 THE CHINESE

Copper Mine " Kapsan " is called by the kindred Japanese
" Kosan." The Chinese retort that the Occidental is not
free of suspicion of opaqueness of expression both in the
written and spoken word. A Chinese student in France
pointed out a hospital which bore the name " Hotel Dieu
du Precieux Sang " and asked " Who the blood was pre-
cious to," and a student in English added his experience
by inquiring when it would be " right to write to Wright."
and when " March fourth " is a date or a command. To
show that Pidgin-English has no 'etymological relation-
ship it is only necessary to give an illustration. Kwai in
pure Chinese is " quick " ; in Pidgin it is " fightee."

A gentleman is marked by his aspirates and tones.
How important these are, can be judged by the greatest
Chinese dictionary issued in 1711, the Pel Wan Yun Fu,
one hundred and thirty volumes, which arranges the
words by their pronunciation, and which monument of
its language China owes to the efforts of her literary Em-
peror, Kang He. A curse and a compliment are differen-
tiated only by the hiss of the lips. Koot means good;
shoot means evil. The same word pronounced in
the Doh tone has a vastly different meaning when the Soh
or Me tone is used. Ta, Erh, San, are one, two,
three in Pekingese in Soh tone, but you would not
want to be responsible for them in Doh tone. The
character the Roman Catholic missionaries use for God
is "Tien Chu"; if you are not careful to give it the
proper lisp, you will say the " Heavenly Pig." When
you squeal yu in a shrill voice you say " fish " ; when
you rumble the same word in a base tone you say " rain."
If you say chi sharply it means " gas," but if you say
chih with a hiss, it means " red." The same word
in Doh tone means " man " and in Soh tone a " disease."

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 259

The reason a Chinese school-room is as noisy as a boiler
shop, is that the requirements of the exact tone compel
the pupils to study their lessons aloud for their own satis-
faction. Because of the many inflections of tone neces-
sary the speech of a highly cultivated Chinese statesman
sounds not unlike a soft song. It is these finely drawn
distinctions of speech which have robbed China of orators
and thus kept the people separated. To speak correctly
requires a low tone and plenty of time, ill suited to the
storm and strenuousness of the rostrum of American life
for instance. Like the Roman, Chinese abounds in im-
personal forms of address, and with historic unconcern
winds its cumbrous course along. Not in these garbs
could a Pepys pirouette. The Chinese involved character
or ideogram, which is a built-up tree, every branch adding
a condition to the parent character is too cumbersome for
business, and some advocates of the new learning are
calling even for the phoneticizing into Roman character,
of the Wenli. For purposes of telegraphy the thou-
sands of Wenli ideograph characters have each a number,
which latter is transmitted, and the receiver looks up the
code to transcribe the message. There are five thousand
distinct characters, and four times as many amended
synonyms.

Similar to our abbreviated writing in account books,
the Chinese shroffs have invented a careless style called
tsao tss or plant writing, which is their nearest ap-
proach to a running shorthand. The characters are cer-
tainly arbitrary enough for any system of grammalogues.
The difference between the rapid commercial and the more
florid styles in writing the character can be at once seen in
the word " son." The commercial style leaves off certain
lines and slurs other lines: commercial l-^z. ; florid ,1

260 THE CHINESE

The Hing Shu, or flowing hand, answers to our unabbrevi-
ated Spencerian, and is the pride of their decorative scroll
work. Books and newspapers are printe/i in the orthodox
Kiai Shu form of character. The ancient characters also
find themselves too indefinite for expressing the abstruse.
The same character acts as noun, verb, or preposition, ac-
cording to its place in the sentence. The indefiniteness of
the present system may be illustrated by the character for
a tree, which is a veritable picture of a banyan with two
hanging branches dropping to take root. The character
representing forest is two of these tree characters run
together. The character of three peaks, shan, JU
of -course is their word for mountain. One bamboo com-
mercial tally cast down i — represents the figure " one,"
and three of them parallel represent " three" £=. As
their system is decimal, two tallies crossed mark the first
halt *4- or ten. The ten cash coin, with this cross of the
Christians upon it, was accordingly despised and shown
contumely by the Boxers in 1900. Earth is represented
as stretching out flat beneath a standing man j£_,
Water is illustrated by sprays arising from an aperture,
V. The character <_i-\ is the representation of a Chi-
nese gable with heavy eaves and ridge tile. Therefore
it stands for the roof of a yamen or academy near a
pagoda, where the schools are held. The character ¥•
is the picture of a child with arms outstretched and
wearing the large grass sun-hat made in Hupeh. Put-
ting the two characters together thus /^> therefore rep-
resents the familiar scene of a boy sheltered under the
academic roof, studying the classics, and in the lan-
guage has become the Arbitrary for the word " litera-
ture." The word san (scatter) is the exact picture
of a helmeted soldier chasing a fugitive who has thrown

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 261

away his hat, thus fft. The character for heaven,
Tien, represents two roofs, one of the stars and one of
the sky, supported by two props or trees '•sfr • The
character for rice (mi) represents a man with his arms
outstretched, standing in a field on which scattered grain
lies, thus •£) . The character for God (Shang Ti)
represents a kneeling mortal in the act of making an
offering before a Being who hovers over the two roofs
of sky and stars, which latter is supported with the
trunk and branches of a banyan, thus J^w- The char-
acter ST is woman; place her under her roof tree, and
the arbitrary represents domestic felicity, or the word
" satisfaction," ^ .

The Chinese language accordingly can be dissected into
roots just as ours can. Punctuation is considered inele-
gant, but I have seen shroffs in Hong-Kong venture upon
the paragraph. The new characters which China calls
for, must come. When they do, the old characters, which
are the most elaborate and beautiful that language ever
designed for its abode, must pass to the select possession
of priests and literati. It should certainly always be
taught in the universities and monasteries, just as our
classic the Greek is preserved from extinction, and it al-
ways has a great mission of culture in interpreting those
proud riches of China, the works of her unrivaled phil-
osophers. There are on the other hand, moderns in other
respects, who declare that the Chinese character will take
upon itself both defmiteness and elasticity, and be able to
grow as lustily as has the Saxon language, which, with its
borrowed Roman characters, has fed on every speech, dead
and living. While the Wenli character means the same
thing all over China, and while the cultured Japanese can
read any Chinese book, the Japanese use the character so

262 THE CHINESE

differently that the Chinese can not read a Japanese book
or paper. The Japanese have long lapsed from the artistic
freedom of stroke in painting the character, which with
them is a stiffer and more squat ideogram.

As soon as a Chinese boy enters the school-room he
bows in reverence before the tablet that bears the name
of Confucius. Decoratively, tablets in that land take
the place of busts and statuary among ourselves. In the
memorial tablet is said to dwell one of the three souls of
a man, the other two with his death going, one to heaven
(Tien), and the other remaining in the grave with the
sacred body.

The Uigur writing of the Manchus is decidedly grace-
ful in occidental taste. It has only been preserved to
translate Chinese books, as the Manchus have lost any
literature which they once may have had. The con-
stricted literary radius of the Manchu can be compre-
hended at a glance when we say that the total library of
these translations amounts to only three hundred books.
There are eighteen consonants and eight vowels. The
alphabet is syllabic in distinction to the monosyllabic
Chinese. As a spoken language, Manchu is retreating
to the fastnesses of Manchuria, and the intruding Jap-
anese purposes to put a quietus upon it there. The de-
cadence of the Manchu in this respect exhibits the
interesting fact that this is the only time in histery where
a conqueror has not flourished a sword in one hand and
a pen in the other. This conqueror put both hands to
his two-edged sword and, perforce, in language was con-
quered by the vanquished in arms. As compared with
the Chinese the Manchu is the more forcible but less
elegant language.

The kindred Mongolian holds its own, especially in the

COPYRIGHT, BV UNDERWOOD A U<SDC*WOOO, N. V.

Oldest pagoda now standing in China. The pentagonal Tien Fung

Tah at Xingpo, 800 A.D. Xote the bold gable Che-

Kiang style, of the residence on the right.

Spirited and delicate carving and tile work, Temple of Cho Shing,
Canton, South China.

Temple of Five Genii, Canton, South China.

Note spirited treatment of draperies of two Genii on right by Chinese
sculptors, who surpass even our St. Gaudens in this re-
spect. Their treatment of the facial expression,
not being according to our canons,
cannot be criticised.

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 263

spoken language which has no dialect, for a Mongol of
Khotan can understand one from Koren. The language
is also alphabetic in distinction to the Chinese arbitrary
character; it abounds in the use of involved adverbial
phrases, wound round and round, like a cocoon's thread,
in the sentence. It is interesting to remember that this
was the writing used by the conqueror, Genghis Khan;
that is to say, it was used by those who wrote for him.
In literature and religion, the Mongols are more closely
allied to the Thibetans than any other of the Chinese
divisions, but the literature, like the Manchu, is mainly
translations of Buddhist books.

Like our own shorthand system, the vowels of the
Mongol writing, with two exceptions, must be guessed.
Thus, the letters N. R. may represent the words pro-
nounced nara (sun), or nere (name). Curiously, some
Mongol sentences are our exact words, as " eat I "
is their expression for " I eat." The Mongolian has no
right and left hand, but rather a " west " and " east "
hand. There is one sacred spot on the Selenga River on
the borders of Siberia and Mongolia where two mission-
aries of the London Mission, Stallybrass and Swan, lived
in what was then a terrible exile from 1818 to 1841, and
translated our whole Bible into Mongolian characters,
and when the battlefields of Genghis, Kuropatkin and
Kuroki are forgotten, the place where these two men
worked will still be drawing the admiring feet of the
world to see a Mongolia redeemed.

There is a censorship in China, the government im-
primatur being two dragons encircling the name of the
book. One of the new great Pus (Boards) is named
' Colonies and Censorship." The government is finding
that the growing press is assertive in the progress of

264 THE CHINESE

China. For example, where four years ago Tientsin
published four native papers or Paos, there are now
twenty-three sheets, and this is an illustration of what
is going on beyond the treaty ports. Hong-Kong's
splendid Chinese sheet is the Wah Tsz Po. Even in
Lhassa a paper has been started by the head Chinese
resident, Tschang Ying. I asked my Chinese humorist
if he expected that the morals of his country would be
improved when newspapers shall have illumed the whole
land, and he replied : " This 'far at least, we shall be harder
to fool." China's organization fulfils many of the his-
toric requirements of modern political power. Over
manners, laws and religion, she long ago established a
centralized authority. It remains, if her civilization is
to be permanent, that a free press shall arise and try
by public opinion the strength of every prop of the
State, rather than to permit an enemy to do so by arms.
The King Pao, or Peking Gazette, the official organ,
has long generously thrown open to foreigners intimate
information concerning the government of the realm.
You will find copies of the monthly issues, bound in yel-
low, lying about any taotai's yamen. The censorship
covers the remarkable privilege of intimately censuring
the Emperor on his expenditures. In times of famine
this board has used its influence for the people, inducing
the throne to curtail park extensions and expenditures
for luxury and ceremony.

The Chinese call what answers to our Elzevir and
pocket editions, a " sleeve edition," the sleeve in that
country serving for both pocket and basket. The stu-
dents at the triennial examinations are searched so that
they may not carry in these sleeve editions or cribs.
There is no copyright protection for authors. At present

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 265

one person in one hundred is reached by their press.
Opinion is not vitalized for quick and concerted action
until the proportion is one in ten, as in Europe. America,
of course, leads with a proportion of one in four.

Where we place on the street corners boxes bearing
the sign : " Throw your papers in here for the Hos-
pital," the Chinese have similar receptacles with the
words " King Sik Tsze Chi," " Reverence the Written
Word, for it is Holy." Their religion teaches that
words never die, and prescribes as an offering to the
informing Spirit of Light, the burning of the printed
Truth, which, after all, is only loaned to mortals, and
should be constantly clarified after it has gathered the
soil and dross of the earth. It is considered a pious
work, even at the Europeanized treaty ports, for natives
to gather every scrap of newspaper and take it to the
monastery to be consigned to the alembic of the sacred
flames. It is quite possible that this bull was promul-
gated by the astute priests of Hwang Te's reign, in the
third century, B. C, in order to bring all books to the:
monastery for hiding, when that most hated of Chinese
monarchs had his prime minister, Le Sze, issue with
a will the infamous " Edict for the Burning of the
Books," the insane design being to date history from the
Tsin dynasty.

Chinese literature is a mine of rare jewels. An ad-
dress to a Manchu prince is embroidered in blue and
red characters on a banner of yellow silk. Attributes of
the Diety are accorded him: " Your Majesty's quicken-
ing influence! in thy hands are the jeweled greetings
from a king's palace; on this happy day of the second
month the wheels of your princely chariot are stayed;
you come as a glorious cloud and as a downpour of

266 THE CHINESE

timely rain; your banners descend from Heaven and the
longings of your people are fulfilled. As your escort
enters the walls, lo! at every door the shouts of the
children arise. Oh, King's Son, your coming swells the
rice and fattens the meat." All this exalted conception
and flowery expression is turned to ridicule by the fa-
cetiousness of the closing paragraph : " Dated on a
lucky day of the second month."

Another petition begins : " For the jewel glance of a
mandarin." You can get some of these interesting
pamphlets among the book-shops on Liu Li Chang Street,
Peking.

When a Chinese writer wishes to express that the
wealthy parent of the heroine has set his affairs in order
before dying in her favor, his idiom is : " He has settled
his plums." "To have plucked the kwei (cassia)
flower," signifies gaining the Master's degree at the
triennial examinations. Their idiom for " Let there be
no backsliding " is : " Let there be no absorption of
sweat." A runaway wife is said by Liu Chia Chu to
" carry her guitar to another door." When you wish to
say you have secured a vindication you express it : " My
adversary has been forced to paint my front door." When
a great man dies they sa^: " A corner of the city wall has
fallen." When a coolie wishes to express his utter de-
testation of the slow movements of another, he hurls out
the following : " Thou egg of a turtle, dost thou dare
to race with a leopard." They do not speak of the port
or starboard sides of a boat, but of the north, south, east
or west sides, so that in all admiralty cases, the essential
thing is to ascertain the course which was laid.

On friendship they have this parable. Shun, once
wealthy and famous, lost land and health, whereupon

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 267

every single friend since his boyhood turned upon him
in calumny and cruelty, like vultures eager to hurry death.
Is therefore mankind incapable of honor, and might a
brave man better have a wallowing sow for a friend?
No, Shun was a blind fool in his prosperity and youth;
his friends were always vultures in disguise, and their
presence kept from him those who would have been real
friends in admiration of his mind and character. Know
that there are those who, when hungry, crawl, and when
fed, take to their wings, and remember, also, that when
the tree falls, the monkeys flee. A wealthy man, and
indeed a man of any estate, never can know friendship,
and should justly doubt the depth of every acquaintance.
Friendship is alone founded in adversity, for poverty is
the test of disinterestedness, as the lamp is the proof of
the ruby. When Tien (God) gives thee poverty, He
too will give thee a true friend, and if thou wouldst have
a friend, famous or rich man, thou must invite or simu-
late poverty, sorrow and pain in the finding of him.
Piteous is that land where there is not the compulsory
charities of the clan, for the law is better than the heart
of man. Did not Confucius say in the Lun Yu, " Have
no friend unlike your heart of hearts."

Regarding the virtuous, Confucians poetically say:
" Devils once attacked a good man, but the tips of their
spears turned into flowers."

The following is a parable of the folly of a policy of
injustice. A water-buffalo looked upon an ant and de-
spised it; blew upon it; grunted at it; vilified its ances-
tors and tablets, boasted to other buffaloes of his hate,
and in supreme insolence, made it the center of his
manure heap. The buffalo laid down to sleep (as help-
less, you will note, as the ant in his needs) in venomous

268 THE CHINESE

satisfaction of having extinguished the very memory of
self-respect in the soul of the ant. Fortified with the
poison of the buffalo's own manure, the ant crawled
forth and stung the buffalo in one eye, and on the blind
side of the ridiculous brute, for ever evades and torments
his impotent fury, to the glory of the gods and the
vindication of the truth.

A cynic was asked : " How is it that every youth is a
hero and flaunts a bribe, and every elder a villain who
can be bribed, first with not less than a thousand taels, and
afterward with a tlao string. Your venal elders are
your former heroes. Pale Huan, the youth, finds that his
honorability has been his downfall. His self-respecting
poverty throughout his youth invited the persecution of
those envious of his shining independence of character.
He decides at last, as earth's responsibilities grow on him,
to suffer no more and to commit no more the compulsory
petty sins of poverty in order to live. He thereupon
commits the one great sin of the rich and takes Shan's
bribe. Oppressed before, as conscience dies, he soon
oppressor grows, all through the law of self-preserva-
tion, which, in the end, banishes true religion in a wicked
world." Again : " There are some so bad that their
sins pickle and confirm them in evil instead of rotting
them."

Another cynic remarks, " Some people cry over graves
only to make the grass of forgetfulness grow the
quicker." And again, " There is no one who will not
smile to the tickle of a bribe, and do not conclude that it
requires long feathers to do the tickling; mankind holds
itself very cheap."

A bonze asks, " Of what avail to scold a brother like
brass, and pray to Buddh like silver ? "

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 269

Epigrams are attributed to busy nations, but they hap-
pen also to be the favorite form of crystallizing the
wisdom of the race which enjoys the most leisure.
" Tact," say they, " is the discounting of principle in the
mart of expediency." " Success is the greatest good to
the smallest number." " When does a statesman de-
scend to be a political trimmer ? " " When he takes his
flag from the poor, but his wheels from the rich." " The
farmer tills the paddy field, but the mandarin tills the
people." The maxims of Confucius are terse epigrams.
How much this sage has influenced the morals of Europe
has not been fully considered. The authorship has not
been credited, but many a sermon and essay have drawn
their inspiring fire or human pathos from the " Five
Classics " of the Orient. The consciousness of inspira-
tion, present in all great teachers, was not unmarked in
Confucius. At fifty-five years of age, when driven to
the wilds of Wei, he declared : " If it is Heaven's will
to reserve me to teach this truth on the earth, the mur-
derous persecutions of these evil men of Kwang will do
nothing to me." \Vonderful that on the same day, Ezra,
the prophet of the true God, who had journeyed from
Babylon, stood amid the ruins of Jerusalem and cried
also of the Great Help : " Our God hath not forsaken
us in our bondage, but hath given us a wall in Judah."
A king (Wu Wang), when asked to substantiate his con-
fidence of victory against an enemy numbering ten thou-
sand, replied : " Because they have ten thousand hearts,
whereas my army has but one heart."

The most eminent of the Chinese characteristics is
displayed in the following conversation. " Shun was
very great in his boldness to cut the knot," said a soldier.
" Shao was great in his patience to untie the knot," said

270 THE CHINESE

a bonze. " Therefore Shao was the greater in genius,"
added a philosopher.

A Chinese satirist rails at those who write lady-like
lyrics with a pot of perfume on the table, and at those
who spend time in perfecting the splendid sweep of the
picturesque Hing Shu characters which are painted on
large motto sheets. He retires to his Epicurean con-
fession, "The enjoyment of ease is my chief concern;
I have lived for Myself."

Another indolent poet, who happens to earn the larger
portion of his bread by occupying a menial position in a
mandarin's household, exclaims : " I would hie from
office cares; by the brooklet I would lie, catch the finny
tribes with snares, read my books and dream and think,
past to present I would link."

The proverb of the laziest man in China is : " It is
easier to know how to do a thing than to do it." A mat-
ter-of-fact man, a forerunner of the new Hok Tong
scholars, said, " To see it once is better than to read
about it a thousand times."

Regarding jealousy they say: " It is easy for two of
a guild to hate," and " Nine women out of ten are
jealous." " Don't bend the mulberry when it is old,"
corresponds to our saw not to teach an old dog new
tricks. On games of chance " The winning tip is to stay
away from the gaming-table." For our in vino ver-
itas, they have " samschu is the arch-thief of secrets,
its bubble is a woman's smile." A cynic rails : " Put
not our Holy Books in the hands of a man until he has
made his competence, for conscience keeps men poor
and the poverty of the virtuous is the opportunity of the
unjust oppressor." When a girl has lost her affianced
their idiom is : " She has spilt her tea." " To have no

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 271

ink in one's stomach " is their expression for lack of
literary ability. On deceit : " The lips of Buddh, but the
teeth of a snake." Equivalent to the Greek hoi polloi
and our " the masses " is their expression, " the myriad
names," which shows that China has always been con-
scious of her vast population. A cynic, but withal a
virtuous man, declares " There are only two true things,
God in Heaven and an honest dollar on earth," and of a
gossiping wife, " If a chattering bird be not placed in
the mouth, vexation will not sit between the eyebrows."
A Buddhist cynic answers a Taoist : " The final proof
that men are not gods is that a poor man, suddenly raised
to a position of wealth, immediately becomes as oppres-
sive of the poor as the rich class which previously he
criticized; therefore the arm of evil is gold, but the seed
of it is in man's heart." Both as a metaphor and as a
moral, the following Mongolian maxim is good enough
for any people : " Cast from thy heart the dog, hog
and serpent, for they are the incarnations of lust, greed
and malice."

On ability, they say : " The world is unsafe when it has
more genius than virtue." On ambition: "Climb the
pole higher to find how much thinner it is." On truth :
" If you tell me a lie you must consider me your enemy
and that you are acting under the rule of self-preserva-
tion, for the bosom of a true friend is the mirror of one's
self." On scandal : " A lie is the branch mirrored on
the surface, but beneath how deep the well of true water."
Where we admonish a student to grind or work, they
express themselves : " May you ever perpetuate the fra-
grance of books in your ancestral home." Concerning
charity they say, " Benevolence being of the heart, no
rule can be set for its acts," and " You can not call a deed

272 THE CHINESE

kind if it is done in the hope of recompense." On ex-
aggeration, " Paint a snake and add legs." They turn
the flame of scorn on the soldiers of the old regime:
"Your valor is at a chicken's neck." On appearances :
" Antics are not always vivacity as the fish on the hook
can say," and " A rat may smile, but it is not ivory." On
the schoolmaster's rod : " The cudgel is the best pol-
isher." On a wife : " Only her husband speaks of a
virtuous woman, but the name of an evil woman grates
on all men's teeth." One who is not a gentleman they
say " lacks the tenth stroke of the lacquer brush." The
inability of a man to keep a secret they express in the
Three States Classic as follows : " If you do not
want anybody to know it, do not even do it." On satire :
" His was a golden pen that rayed the shafts of truth."

A philosopher says : " The world is about equally
divided between good and bad people; in the good is a
small proportion of bad ; in the bad is a small proportion
of good. This balance of virtue and evil is so perfect
that it requires the nicest adjustment of the individual to
adapt himself to his environment, and yet remain loyal
to his class; in fact, our civilization contemplates the
direction of the clan more than the man, and we have at
least evolved as a national virtue, the humility of the
individual." Their most cynical saying is : " The cre-
ator is like a cruel sculptor; he fashions man the statue;
he tires of it and chips it day by day with persecutions;
then petulant, he smashes it at last into dust."

Their idiom for spending an afternoon is to say, " I
ate an afternoon there."

A poet who was passing, after enjoying the view, called
to thank the owner of many acres. " But I have not
given them to you." " You have done better; you give

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 273

me the pleasure of viewing the scenery, without my be-
ing under the burden of paying the taxes on it. As you
pay the taxes for my view, I must thank you."

A certain Jesuitical doctrine regarding the end justi-
fying the means, a Chinese philosopher refutes as fol-
lows : " If Chang steals Wong's fortune and uses it
all in charity, what credit is to Chang? None. The
credit will be laid to Wong by the god of Restoration,
and Chang must answer for sacrilege to the god of Op-
portunity/' And again, " If Kwok commits but one sin
by killing Li's child in envy, but performs ten thousand
charities with his \vealth, is there any tally for Kwok?
None. He answers to two gods; he tries to deceive the
god of Vengeance with the property of the god of Bene-
factions." The Chinese throughout their literature and
conversation take the keenest interest in the morals of
wealth, and thus predate the twentieth century in
America. In their action with the rich in times of
famine, they have put in practice the principle of our sug-
gested income and prevailing death taxes, the confisca-
tory principle being operative above a certain figure.
Wealth over a certain number of millions is confiscated
for three purposes, the relief of the poor in famine,
the extension of education and the larger national exigen-
cies such as dikes and afforestation. The ground taken
is that the law must have been evaded, as no individual
could honestly secure a fortune which overtopped the
State itself. The government on its own part steps into
the breach, and for this it has not received due credit,
by remitting to the people in times of stress, and emigra-
tion to new districts, the land taxes for one or two years.

Examples of Chinese proverbs are : " Opportunities
come in cycles, like meteors. " Between the mulberries,

274 THE CHINESE

plant beans, for two things can not fail." " The mouth
of a dumb man and the look of a fool, make a ruler, for
the first outwits his inferiors and the latter his superiors."
" A child's slap on a plow-buffalo's ear, and a hint to
a wise man, are sufficient" " Shave Chang every day,
but skin his buffalo once." " Those who chase kites, fall
over straws." The Kan Ying Pien homily says:
" Happiness and trouble stand at every one's gate ; yours
is the choice which you will invite in."

The very constitution of the Chinese written charac-
ter has guided them to think and express themselves
poetically. The people along the Yangtze call their
great river " The Son of the Sea " because the tides flow
upon it. A vast number of people in the eastern section
never call their land anything else than Sse Hai, " The
country of the four seas." Korea is called Chaosien, the
" Dewy morning land." Shanghai interpreted is " Near-
ing the sea," and Hong-Kong is " Fragrant streams," be-
cause of the damp earth and vegetable odors brought out
by the equatorial storms which suddenly leap with wild
white manes from the hills in August. Lhasa is " God's
Ground." Canton is " The broad city," and Ningpo,
within sight of the great bore of Hang-chow Bay, means
" Beautiful wave city." China also has her golden gate
port, for Quemoy Island at the entrance to Amoy literally
is " Golden Harbor." The names of the provinces are
similarly poetic : Shan-tung is " East of the hills " ;
Fu-kien means " Happily established " ; Shansi, " West of
the hills." Shensi, " Western defiles." Hupeh, " North
of the lakes." Szechuen, " Four streams." The oldest
known to us, Kwangtung, means the " Broad east."
Yunnan is " South of the cloudy mountains " of Thibet.
Kansu, where the conquered Mohammedans dwell among

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 275

the sesamum oil trees, is satirically named " Voluntary
reverence."

The names of popular brands of tea are bestowed with
literary taste : " Autumn Dew," " Pearl Flower,"
" Lotus Heart," etc. Even a potato is an " earth egg."
The almonds of Shensi Province are an abundant source
of food, and it is beautifully suggestive to see the many
restaurants all over the. land with signs out bearing the
legend, " The Almond Flower." Where we would say
" May you flourish like the green bay tree," the Chinese
idiom is " May you be as full as a peony," for that flower
represents wealth in their figure of speech.

The ming or given name of girls is often taken
from flowers, as "Jasmine" Chung; "Orchis" Choy,
etc., and boys have names such as " .Moon-shining "
Cheng; "Olive Bud" Fong; "Temple Steps" Shun; or
" Pagoda of Letters " Yung. Sometimes the family or
sing names are also taken from nature, as Yuen Chuen,
" Sweet Spring." A late ambassador to America who
was educated at Yale, would perforce be called in our
produce exchange, if his name were translated, " Mr.
Millet," and the most progressive viceroy, Yuan Shi K'ai
is literally " Mr. Duck."

Where our statesmen refer to the olive branch of
peace, they phrase it " may the bamboo wave." The
Chinese line of beauty is set forth as follows : " Yang's
lids and eyebrow were twin willow leaves above a pearly
pool." Where we wish a happy pair the conjugal felicity
of two mated doves, they make it " two geese," and at
the marriage ceremony the bride kowtows to a pair of
the latter. Where we wish age the honors of " cedars
of Lebanon," they say " May you be as wide as a chrys-
anthemum border," for that flower is their emblem of

276 THE CHINESE

longevity. They call age a " candle in a draft." They
could not wish a child to be as pure as a lily, for that
flower is their emftlem of death. Their flower of virtue
is the plum blossom. Where we say " as quick as a
shot or a bird," their figure is " with the speed of flames."
Love they call the " oil of the lamp of life."

The Emperor's palace is called " The Palace of
Heaven," and the Empress', " The Palace of Earth's Re-
pose." Although China invented, the compass which
points to the South Pole, there is a temple at Peking
dedicated to the " God of the North Star." Not to be
behind the humor of Occidentals who build cathedrals
over the bones of a saint, Peking has erected an obelisk
over a piece of Buddha's skin.

Delightful to a strenuously tired Occidental, Peace is
for ever in their mouths. " The Gate of Heavenly
Rest;" "The Temple of the Eternal Peace of the
Lamas;" "The Gate of Extensive Peace;" "The Hall
of Secure Peace," are all at Peking.

The Shi King, a book of three hundred odes, is laden
with lyrics as dainty as are Campion's. " The new wife
is a peach bud. The aged pair entwined wistarias are.
Peace is a bamboo spear in flower. The great man's
soul cried out for God and swept his body like a husk
away. ' The moth-like eyebrows of my moonlight girl '
suggests the universal use of powder by decent women
in China. Fei's step is as light as the lotus on water.
As typhoons sweep the bamboo's sprays, so Death blows
up old Age's sleeve. The white owl hoots of death upon
the stricken poet's sill. Slow as a nut-oil wick her life
departs. His concubine the cold jade-jewel; his first
wife was a true peach flower. Years fly like arrows, one
eager to pass the other to the mark. A forgiving answer

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 277

is vernal from the mouth." All of them twine nature so
as to adorn some human interest, and the human motive
is not read into nature in the affected occidental fashion
of our day.

China had its Chatterton in the poet Tu Fu, who
starved to death on a temple's steps ; its Edgar Allan Poe
in Kia Yi, who wrote centuries ago A White Oivl Ode
with the exact plot of The Raven; and its Hood in Han
Yu, who warns the farmer's son who became a mandarin :
" Ne'er forget the chastening ditch that found thee poor
and left thee rich." A counterpart of Leigh Hunt is Su
Tung Po, who languished in prison for his satires and
whose imaginative flights are little short of Miltonic.
His poetry best bears translation into English without
losing as much of the boquet of the original as other
poets suffer in the transition. Li Po was their Ovid in
the praise of wine and women; Chuang Tze their Shel-
ley in imaginative flights.

Szma Tsieri, who wrote his great history B. C. IOO,
compares with our Herodotus, and Li Pai with our
Horace. Outside of the realm of pure literature, the
fifty volumes of Li Shi Chin published in 1590 are at
once a Materia Medica and an Audubon. Chinese
naturalists describe with surprising exactness the habits
of animals, fish and insects. As an illustration of official
knowledge on these subjects, note this extract from a
late proclamation of the viceroy of the two Kwang
Provinces concerning the extirpation of grasshoppers:
" During this month great flights have appeared in our
adjoining province. At this time our second crop of
rice is in the blade. The insects first are seen on the
borders of large morasses. They produce their young
in hillocks of black earth an inch deep, the hole remain-

278 THE CHINESE

ing open. The nests are in colonies. One grasshopper
drops ten pellets, each containing one hundred young.
At early dawn they can not fly easily from the tender rice
as the dew is on their wings. Catch them at the nest
and in the morning. At evening when fed they resort to
one spot. There dig a trench with wings and fill it with
fire, throwing flaming brush over them as they crawl
in heaps toward the pit."

That their criticism can be patriotic and sturdy, the
following will illustrate. Under the temple bells and the
bamboos that whispered of Chinese sages who studied
beneath them when Europe and America were fastnesses
for the auk and the reindeer, and our warriors wore
wolf masks over their heads, a bonze thus accumulated
his criticism of us. " The Anglo Saxons and the West
deride us. Why? You were great only once and that
time is not now. You will never produce a Bible or a
Shakespeare again, for used to luxuries as you are now,
you will for ever despise the simple poverty that pro-
duced the poetry of Elizabeth's time and the manly
virtues which evolved the philosophy of Plato's and
Paul's day. The asceticism and unselfishness of your
Bible gave you sturdy virtues, but now that you have
machinery you are looking unto wealth for greatness,
forgetting the odium of your despised Crcesus and that
your philosophic (so-called religious) literature alone
has brought you strong unto the present. You must
fall. You ask us to impoverish our thought and our
character by a universal debauch of pampering and really
ignorant riches. Our State is not reared over a burning
mine, for where no individual fortune exceeds half a
million (since Li Hung Chang passed) there is no cause
for rebellious envy on the part of the unhappy many

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 279

against the privileged few, and little opportunity for that
grinding oppression which breeds undying hate because
prominence and selfishness are synonomous.

" Every garment frays first at the hem and every
branch dies first at the tip; so your furthest colonization
in America shows the first signs of the protest, the denial
of justice by the privileged, and the decay of confidence,
but the root in England .will die too. How inconsistent
you are ; your society despises the emigrants now reaching
you, but you clamor that you are descendants from still
poorer emigrants. Anchored to the soil as we are, we will
never swing in history, as you will, between the extremes
of a tyrannous oligarchy and an unstable, socialistic prole-
tariat. We shall always surpass you in the judgment
of universal history and the immemorial God (Tien),
and in the production of our Shakespeares and Platos,
for our State is founded on an honest poverty which has
time to think and courage to be virtuous. We have
never enslaved manhood within the State as have your
Roman and Saxon, or enthralled alien dependencies to
our chariot of pride, as do your Briton in India and your
American in the Philippines. When you have retro-
graded to an opulent barbarism sufficiently savage to at-
tack us, we shall destroy you in the resort to arms, not so
much by our strength as from your weakness and the
lack 'of patriotism among your classes. The test will
then be whether privilege, or land, makes men.

" There have been peoples as ostentatious as you be-
fore, Babylon for instance, and in public monuments the
Pyramids are as stupendous as what Pittsburgh makes;
yet they stand for a dead, race ; not so our Great Wall,
which stands with a live race. Again I repeat, you are
not doing anything new, and you were greatest as intellec-

280 THE CHINESE

tual men in Shakespeare's day, and as moral men in
Paul's day. The intellectual decline has been gradual;
next came Milton, and then you dwindled down to Dick-
ens, Longfellow and Carlyle, till now, how thin is your
veneer of letters. Morally, how dead and sad the review.
You are the only race who, powerful enough to retain it,
has given over your religious shrine, Palestine, to an un-
believer, and yet five hundred million of you attribute all
your civilization to the Bible of that land. This astound-
ing sacrilege has eternally amazed us, and we can see no
reverence, love or depth in you. We glory in teaching
Confucius in all schools and in preserving his shrine.
You throw your greatest book out of your national
schools. You were harder to civilize than any race, a
bloody tearing down preceding every building up, as
under Cromwell and in Russia to-day. For every little
law, you have sent your people to their swords to win
it.

" Your whole system is one of objection to improve-
ment and temperamentally you could not accept as a
race a peaceful endowment of civilization such as Con-
fucius bestowed upon us. All your Emperors dress as
generals of war; ours alone as a philosopher of peace.
When we would translate your word Liberty, we perforce
are driven to the character Rebellion, for so you have
won it. We have never flung derision at the constitution
as have your races when the bravoes of Milo and Clodius,
of doges and dukes, made private altercation a substitute
for public pleading. Where each citizen already rules
himself with Shun (morality) the State is already clothed
in Liberty. In the adaptation of ourselves to the inven-
tive age you will see that we shall reach the higher planes
without bloody disorganization, as we are a race with

City wall, Ching-tu. capital of Sze-chuen, furthest West province.
The lower part is the oldest city wall in China, contemporary
with the Great Wall. Watchman on water gate. Phy-
sician gathering simples. In early times Sze-chuen
was famous for its engineers.

Looking from the Imperial Bank of China toward the British and
American quarters, Shanghai, East Central China.

Gondola, and marble revetment walls of lake in Royal Palace
Grounds, Peking, North China.

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 281

conscience and faith enough to follow what Time, the
only test (and test us by it) has proved to be right.
Look to yourselves ! "

The performance of a theatrical company (Thespians
in China are called "Brothers of the Pear Trees") is
extended to the length of a festival. Great structures of
bamboo and mats are erected near the water-front, partly
that the lapping waves may be referred to by the gestur-
ing actor in the climax of the play, but particularly in
order that the sampan people may have no excuse for
staying away. Historical dramas from their Shakes-
peare-Jonson-Fletcher collection, the " one hundred plays
of the Yuan Dynasty," which take days to perform, are
given. Farces and sketches are interspersed to enliven
proceedings. The titles of the latter are as we might
expect : Ah Bing Selling His Pig; The Congratulations
of the Eight Genii; A Visit to the Moon; The Fairy
Wife, etc. On April i6th, reminiscent of the world's
creation, a religious drama is performed, the title being
The Opening of the Peach.

The two lowest grades of Chinese society, both of
whom are debarred from entering the classical examina-
tions, are a keeper of an opium den and an actor. It can
therefore be judged how all China burst into a laugh of
derision when there was added in 1906 to the Exempts
under the American Exclusion Act, immediately after
scholars, who are the highest class, actors, who are dia-
metrically opposed. Yet priests and actors fraternize
sometimes. At Chowtung in Yunnan, the gorgeous Tem-
ple of the Black God has a theatrical stage set up in the
court. This stage displays in perfect proportion the best
features of Chinese architecture and is notable. In the
courtyard of the Temple of the God of Riches at Tang-

282 THE CHINESE

yueh, just on the borders of Burmah, a theater is set up,
and one can pray or laugh under the patronage of the
same bonze. The costumes of the actors are as gorgeous
as description can paint, even surpassing the robes of the
throne. In passing we might mention that the favorite
gown of those who act the part of an empress is of yellow,
with a very wide border of purple wistaria. Women do
not act. Their parts are taken by men, and the Chinese
in whose speech many falsetto tones are in constant use,
can dissemble the female perfectly. When applause is ex-
pected from the falsetto ladies on the stage, it is given
in a chorus of orthodox squeaks. As soon as the curtain
is 'rung up, all the actors troop out and kowtow before
the mandarin's box, which sways on its draped bamboos
in more apparent than real jeopardy. China has not yet
evolved the modern drama, so popular in Japan, where
heroes are apotheosized and the doings of gods, mythical
warriors and living heroes are woven into a wonder play.
When Nogi and Oyama go to the Honchodori Theater
the curtain is rung up (or really tom-tommed up) to re-
veal some slain subaltern of Port Arthur in the act of
tearing down a Russian flag, while mythical Kagekio and
Terasu present the hero with a sword and a dove.

The Chinese actor is apprenticed for four years and
the repertoire of a star consists of about fifty plays. The
playwright, just as Shakespeare did, travels with the
company as its permanent adapter of the ancient tragedies
and traditions, and proving that mankind, whatever the
color, has ever been strung to the same chords, he never
fails to consign the villain to tortures, the oppressor to
accidents sent by the gods, and the hero to recompense,
bliss and applause. The Actors' Guild comprises thirty
thousand members, and the highest individual earnings

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 283

are eighteen hundred dollars a year. As already stated,
certain plays are performed in Buddhist temples, the nuns
being permitted to dance, but these plays are more popu-
lar in the country bordering Siam and Burmah, and if we
go over the border to the Wat Chang Temple in Bangkok,
we can easily find bold examples of them.

A Chinese city shorn of its street signs would be like
a pheasant plucked of its plumage. Rob Heavenly
Peace Street, at Canton, or Tung Tan Street, Peking,
of their black and gold signs and yellow lanterns, and it
would be as though you tore the transforming sunset
from the bare loess hills of China. Not only is the
beauty of gilt work exhibited, but marvelous creations in
alto-rilievo carving are hung out. The signs follow the
triple plan of mentioning the name, birthplace and motto.
The business is not mentioned, as " Fung Shan, born
Sam Shui City, — This is the Abode of Generosity and
Light." Sometimes merely the picture of an animal is
the sign. The tiger has been adopted by the Clothiers'
Guild. With the words " Strength and Courage "
added, it is hung out over the tailors' shops which are
equipping the new Volunteer Corps. Here is a hasty
gleaning of the street names of Canton : " New Green
Pea," " Medicine," " Golden Flower," " Plum Lane," and
as this is the city which next to jade worships the pearl,
we find they have named a street and their river (Chu
Kiang) after the latter jewel. A popular name for a
city gate is " Entrance of Bright Amiability." The
beauty of poetry is not without its humbling fault of
humor, a charcoal shop being called : " The adornment
of the Eyes," and a pawnshop " Virtuous and Prosper-
ous."

In the rear where the cashier, or shroff, sits behind his

284 THE CHINESE

swanpan, the shop is no less gorgeous than the signs.
The front half of the store, where the willow and cam-
phor-wood boxes of merchandise are packed, is paved
with plain red brick tiling or granite blocks, but the rear
portion is divided by a screen of massive and elaborately
carved blackwood, pointed heavily with gold, and over-
head is carved a gilded Confucian motto, such as " To
become permanently wealthy, you must exercise the prin-
ciple of right." The stench of the street is fought back
by burning pieces of sandal and teak woods, and by in-
cense sticks smouldering in the ashes before the ancestral
tablets, for all China, except the fokis, lives where it
works. They are only business streets, but the signs
suggest to a stranger the way to a temple, not only by
the religious mottoes, but by the lavish beauty of red,
green and gold lacquer. Chinese signs perforce are
pendant and narrow, for two reasons : because the letter-
ing must be horizontal, and because the streets are so
narrow. There are three characteristic things which we
learn to associate with and love in Chinese cities: first,
the signs, and then the pagodas and lanterns. As the
traveler goes farther north, notably at Liao Yang, it is
noticeable that the signs are not suspended but are ele-
vated upon lacquered posts. The post itself bears the
firm's motto and the arms are given up entirely to deco-
ration. In Kin Chou Fu in Manchuria, the one-storied
khan or inn is marked by a tall lamp post and a long
semaphore arm, from which hangs a strirfg of metal
rings with horse-hair plumes, which flutter out an in-
vitation to the camel drivers from distant Mongolia to
rest a while. Occasionally mine host greets a suspicious
Japanese or a curious Westerner who has the twin habits
of roaming and writing. Rich merchants provide in their

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 285

wills for inns, as a public benefaction, and depend upon
the monumental gates which front them for their glory.

Other characteristic architectural features are the walls
which are built around private residences and com-
pounds; the monumental topes of the dead lamas, and
the pai-loa arches in honor of widows who would not re-
marry. The walls are composed of a stucco called chu-
nam, generally mauve colored, and a foot from the top is
inserted a dainty fretwork of tiling. Set into the stucco
at wide intervals are panels of blue and white porcelain.
Nothing is crowded in the work of their architects who
believe in the beauty of line and the significance of plain
masses relieved only a little.

In the middle of the main street at Wuchow stands a
noble circular archway which sets the view in a frame.
There are two wing arches with smaller circular open-
ings. None of these arches is made to drive through;
they must be circumvented. The most pleasing pai-loa
arch is erected on the shore of the lake in the grounds
of the Summer Palace, Peking. In proportions, grace,
and just enough of the sumptuous carving, it is alto-
gether a delight to western eyes. As a rule, however,
the architecture of arches in the northern provinces, such
as Shansi, is Doric in its simplicity, as compared with
the more bizarre and ornamented arches of the southern
provinces. The most famous arch in China, the most
individual arch extant, is that which stands at the entrance
to the Ming Tombs near Peking. Five towers crown its
five square arches. It is a massive, awesome and tri-
umphant memorial to the great artistic emperors. Na-
poleon copied Titus' arch; America copied Napoleon's,
but the Mings found in themselves the original inspira-
tion for an architectural expression which has never been

286 THE CHINESE

equalled for balance, power, scope, truth, and singular
daring. Standing in the now unpeopled plain over
against the mountains of the creator, it seems almost
Eternity's monument, magnificent amid the sorrows and
desolation of the inhabitants of the earth. See it and
be steadied in your taste for ever.

Whatever adverse may be said of Chinese perspective,
there are certainly no painters of birds, insects and
flowers to equal them. They catch the poise and color
to a second. They delight to deceive their larks and
short-tailed cats with their canvases. Famous also are
the temple scenes of Wu Tao Tsz, which are sought for
the royal collections.

For uniqueness, Canton's concentric carved ivory balls
can not be overesteemed. How wonderfully the work-
men cut one within another ! Each one is minutely fash-
ioned into beautiful open tracery so that the partitions left
shall show flowers, pagodas, temples and animals. The
scalpel which carves the balls is, of course, introduced
through the holes of each completed ball.

If anything artistic is found inland, they will tell you
it was made at Canton or Nanking, the latter city in
addition enjoying a literary fame, and being the center
of the book trade. The Chinese have a saying : " You
never know what luxury is till you have lived in Canton."

As odd as the native appreciation in medicine of gin-
seng, for which we have no estimation, is their appreci-
ation of the yuk, or greenish-white jade stone. Nothing
can take precedence of it as the chief object of virtu in
Chinese taste, in which place it has ruled supreme since
the second century, B. C. It is sometimes set as a wheel
around a golden hub, and is cut into rings and hair-pins,
but generally it is made into a massive seal representing

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 287

a monkey or a pear. The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, has the finest collection in America. The
stone is softer when first mined than it is after exposure,
when it becomes exceedingly hard. The polish gives it
a soapy appearance and texture. The stone is found in
small pieces in river beds in Mongolia, but the chief
source is the mountains of Yunnan, and Yunnan City
and Canton dispute the supremacy for the cutters' shops.
The Yunnan quarries at Tali also supply the cloudy
marble which is carved along the veins of color into fan-
tastic trees, landscapes and animals.

In Kwong Man Shing's and Wing Cheong's jewelry
shops on Queen's Road Central, Hong-Kong, you will
notice that no prices are fixed upon the many gold ar-
ticles which are worked generally in 20 carat metal. The
weighing is done before you on a long and short lever
of ebony or ivory, which is notched with minute gradu-
ations. Jewels are also weighed, as well as examined
before the glass and flame. The link cuff-buttons, popu-
lar with foreigners, always bear the characters shao (long
life), and fuh (happiness).

Those who have traveled in' the Orient will recall the
captain warning them from the rail which has been newly
lacquered while the steamer laid in port. The varnish
is very poisonous, the gatherers who work at night among
the varnish trees at Ningpo having to protect face and
hands. The tree is a species of rhus. The process of
lacquering book covers and objects of virtu is a tedious
one. It must be performed in a room which is sealed
from wind and dust. The applications oddly dry best
when it is damp and with a temperature of about eighty-
seven degrees. Each application of dense black is pol-
ished with powdered charcoal and pumice stone. When

288 THE CHINESE

the gold-leaf powder is applied through a sieve which is
tied over the end of a bamboo tube, the artist must be
sure of his slightest movement, as the gummy surface
will not permit the slightest correction. Lighter colors,
such as the golden brown and green, are effected by mix-
ing gums of other trees, as well as pig's gall and camellia
oil. Gilt flowers are laid between the different layers
so that as the lacquer wears, the glorious blossoms rise
gradually to the surface, even as a lotus bursts through
the dark swamp. This is the idea in the minds of both
the artist and the connoisseur. The carving of the thick
lacquer paste is a lost art of the Imperial manufactories
of the Ming dynasty. The product shone with the bril-
liancy of a jewel.

Wayside shrines are as numerous as, but far more
beautiful than the bizarre specimens that one finds in
Mexico or Spain. Sometimes two monoliths with gilt
texts artistically applied, support a highly decorated cap-
stone. Sometimes the shrine is a miniature temple
of solid blocks, with merely the incense aperture, while
others, like the Altar of Heaven in the suburbs of Fu-
chau, are jewel-like in crimson and gold lacquer, and
are equipped with luxurious Nanking porcelain seats and
kongs of flowers.

Carved stone lions are the most popular of all statues
in a land which has no lions. That in front of the Lama
Temple, Peking, is an excellent example, as are also
those which decorate the great flight of steps to the
temple on Siung Shan Island at Chinkiang. These are
all made at Nanking, China's Athens of sculpture.

The vermilion of Canton is a characteristic coloring
perfected by a famous secret The quicksilver which is
employed in its preparation at present is largely brought

CHINESE ART AND LITERATURE 289

from America, and how the Chinese importers of Des
Voeux Road, Hong-Kong, squabble over the elusive
globules which have escaped into the hold of the vessel
from the long retorts. The basal powder is produced
first as a sublimation in contact with sulphur on the sides
of the retorts. The Emperor's Great Seal is dipped in
vermilion. The native quicksilver mines are far inland
in Kweichow, and have been worked since the fourteenth
century. The product is transported in pigs' bladders,
but poor local transportation has compelled the nation to
import for its growing requirements.

VII

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS IN CHINA

The Shang Pu (Board of Commerce) has pretty well
laid out the railway policy. Half of the midland trunk
line, north to south, from Peking to Canton, has been
completed to Han-kau, a distance of seven hundred and
sixty-eight miles, and is known as the Lu-Han Railway.
It was built under the direction of Jadot, a Belgian, with
a loan of thirty-one millions indirectly from France, and
repaid in only ten years. The road is thrown across the
shifting Hoang-ho on a notable bridge of one hundred
and twenty spans. Han-kau ("mouth" of the Han
River as it meets the Yangtze) boasts of a channel six
hundred miles to the sea, twenty-three feet deep. It is
the emporium of the black tea trade. This city will be
the future Pittsburgh of the Orient, as here meet the iron,
coal and antimony beds of Hupeh. She has already
shipped pig-iron to Brooklyn, N. Y., at a price laid down
of seventeen dollars gold a ton, including four dollars
and seventy-five cents freight, which speaks portentous
volumes for the future. Two things are noticeable at
Han-kau: commercial antipathy to the European, and
the popularity of the Japanese street hawkers, who have
never before come so far inland. Han-kau will grow
at Shanghai's expense. The London Homeward Con-
ference (Suez route) has now agreed to charge the same
rates from Han-kau as from Shanghai. There is a
province-owned steel plant, with an output of one thou-

290

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 291

sand two hundred tons a day, already in operation at
Han-yang (across the river from Han-kau), which is
constantly shipping to Japan and occasionally to Mex-
ico. The ancient method of producing carbon iron,
still followed in opulent Shansi Province, is as follows:
ore and one-quarter of coal dust are mixed in sixty cru-
cibles, eighteen inches by six inches, and with the usual
layers of coal, cinders arid clay, are placed in a furnace
which is fired for sixteen hours. Very fine wrought iron
is afterward hammered from the product over a wood
fire.

The railway from Peking to Canton will run almost all
the way over and between beds of iron and coal, the
largest in the world. Every prophecy in this respect of
Richtofen thirty-eight years ago, has been verified, in-
credulous as it seemed at that time. The next largest
area is in Shansi with its fourteen thousand square miles
of anthracite, twenty-two feet thick, and immense bi-
tuminous beds besides. Then follows Szechuen with
its fabulous beds which crop out in plain sight even along
the gorges of the Yangtze River. Who would suspect
that China mined twenty million tons of coal last year?
You have hardly left Peking when the old transportation
system appears in strong contrast with the new. At
Paoting Fu, a name of shame because of the murder of
the American missionaries in 1900, shaggy dromedaries
and wheelbarrow trains come down to the railway from
the Shansi mines. The camels are led by a wooden peg
inserted through the nose. They cost fifteen dollars each.
Every driver is a one-time Boxer. At Tsechow, a moun-
tain of anthracite is tilted three thousand feet above the
plain. To reach these deposits a branch would have to be
run thirty miles from the present Peking-Han-kau Rail-

292 THE CHINESE

way at a severe gradient. The coal beds on the main line
level are flooded with the exfiltration seepage of the Yel-
low River and pumping is costly. As nearly all the land
is a porous loess, drainage, more than grades, is the all-
serious problem, and China's cry is for pumps.

A New Yorker, familiar with the small locomotives
which used to pull the elevated trains, will be humorously
reminded of the old days of jolt and grime, by seeing sev-
eral of them harnessed on the Canton end of the line to
second-class cars, which are merely flat cars with a roof
and no sides. The old signal disks which indicated
" Sixth " and " Ninth " Avenues are retained on the tops
of the cabs, the Chinese engineer explaining with the in-
finite courtesy of the race : " no wanchee change good
luck pidgin." The first derailment occurred at Fatshan
when a water-buffalo became patriotic in opposing the ef-
frontery of progress. The delight of the Chinese wreck-
ing crew over the use of the derrick was indescribable.
Former Viceroy Chum, burning with zeal for the New
China, is advocating the extension of the line from Can-
ton to the deserted deep-water port of Whompoa, ten
miles away, and famous for its intercourse with foreign-
ers for three centuries. His plan is a direct challenge of
the supremacy of Hong-Kong in the far East. Hong-
Kong is hotly alarmed over the possibility of seeing one-
third of her vast trade depart. Hong-Kong has the
advantage of graving docks but Whompoa will eventually
offer cheaper coal from the Pe River and Fa Yuen mines,
lower freight rates, and a patriotic sentiment, for this will
be their own port for Canton. The first result of the bat-
tle has been Shum's removal to another province, and ac-
tivity in building the Kowloon-Canton Railway with
British capital and partly through British territory, but

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 293

Shum and those who think like him, are scotched, not ex-
terminated. There is room for both ports in the develop-
ment of Southern China.

The remaining seven hundred and fifty miles of the
Peking-Canton Railway will be financed to an extent by
the Hong-Kong government and the Hong-Kong and
Shanghai Banking Corporation, with the opium and
other revenues of the two Kwang Provinces as security.
The road will be partly financed by Chinese underwriters,
America having unwisely released this famous concession
at a profit to the American holders of six and one-half
millions. What's the use of thinking imperially when
we can act profitably for our own if not our son's sake?
The concession was sold by Morgan and Company to
Chang Chili Tung, Viceroy of Hupeh, Chang borrowing
four and one-half millions from Montague and Company,
London, and their underwriters, on the understanding
that Britain would have the veto over any foreigners
employed in construction work. The viceroy of the two
Kwang Provinces raised the other two and one-half
millions of the purchase by a wonderfully popular sub-
scription covering tens of thousands of small lots. Thus
the concession which China gave away cost her six and
one-half millions to buy back, another lesson in patriotism
recited bitterly by the New China party, but partly for-
given when America, led by that Daniel of justice and
judgment, Roosevelt, restored a third of the absurdly
large Boxer indemnity. Only twenty-eight miles of road
had been laid do\vn. China has added forty miles.
When the road is opened, it will throw the marvelous
gorge scenery of the Upper Yangtze, where the cliffs
rise two thousand feet from the river's edge, open to
sightseers at a cost of only three days' time from Canton.

294 THE CHINESE

Ninety miles from Canton, where the railway passes the
.Pe River, perpendicular coal seams are prominent, and
horizontal mining can be accomplished at little cost. The
engineers employed in nearly all Chinese railway construc-
tion are Japanese. On the northwest road from Peking
to Kalgan, Chinese engineers are employed. This road is
being entirely financed from the coffers of the Wai-Wu
Pu (Foreign Board). In some cases the cais (foremen)
are also Japanese. The Canton-Han-kau road, called the
Yuet-Han Railway, is at present employing the most fa-
mous of the Chinese railway engineers, Kwong Sun Mau.
The president, Cheng To Chai, is experiencing difficulty
in diking out the provincial political floods which threaten
to engulf his financing and construction. It is the old
temerity of the South, the world over, to awake and know
herself.

The roads from Nanking to Shanghai, and through the
silk province from Soochow to Ningpo and Wuchow, via
Hang-chow (the ancient capital of the Sung dynasty and
the loveliest city of China) are under way through these
nursery grounds of Chinese liberty. From Swatow to
Chao Chou Fu on the Little Han River, sixty-five miles,
a railway is being constructed, and will later be extended
to the earthquake city of Amoy. With money with-
drawn from Russian schemes, the French plan to build
a trunk railway from Hanoi, the capital of Tonquin,
four hundred miles through tin and copper territory and
elephant fastnesses, to Yunnan City. The mephitic
Namti Valley, which this road must cross, and which
separates the Red River from the high tablelands, is
levying a death toll of seventy per cent, among the work-
ers, and filling the Orient with a growing scandal. It
is already impossible to get the Yunnanese to enlist.

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 295

Coolies ignorant of the conditions are brought from
Shan-tung, and seventeen thousand of these, the tallest
and strongest of the race, are employed in the Namti Val-
ley alone. Work is entirely suspended in the primeval
gullies and jungles during the summer rains. In the cool
season, thirty-five thousand Annamese are brought up to
the work. This valley is destined to live in history. No
modern public work ever levied such a toll, neither
Panama, Suez, or the Russian works in southern Turkes-
tan. It will be four years before Yunnan and Haiphong
can be linked, and the tale of difficulties only asserts the
adage that the Tropics do not write histories of wars
because they are engaged on a more compendious History
of Fevers.

At Yunnan City this French road will connect with the
British concession which comes from Calcutta and Man-
dalay, thence going northeast as far as Choong King at
the headquarters of the Yangtze, where the soil is so
worked by irrigation that it supports twelve hundred
people to the square mile. The figures involved in the
opening-up of such teeming provinces are more like the
unreasonable repetitions of a dream than a commercial
certainty of the near future. This province alone is as
large, as populous, as thrifty, and infinitely richer in
natural resources than France. At Yunnan will meet
two other roads, one from Bangkok and one from Can-
ton, so that Yunnan City, from a railway aspect, will be-
come a sort of St. Louis, as a midland distributing point.
On account of the altitude of six thousand feet, Yunnan
City, two days from Canton by the railway, will be a new
summer resort for the coastal tropic cities. The sum-
mers are delightful and from October to April the sun
shines from a rare and cloudless sky. Yunnan is nearly

296 THE CHINESE

as rich as Shensi in both kinds of coal, and considering
in addition her gold, copper and salt deposits, she may
be termed the richest in minerals of all the provinces, as
she is also the lowest in intellectual boasts, for here the
mixed races and aborigines abound. Kwangsi, the ad-
joining province, which the railway will cross, will gather
its freight from unnumbered antimony mines.

The French concession, on account of the hilly country,
is for a narrow gage railway. All the other roads in
China are of the standard American gage of four feet
eight and one-half inches. At present the only transpor-
tation from Burmah and Tonquin into China (that by
pack trains) collapses four months annually, owing to the
rains blocking the roads. When this French road is
built, Kwang Se and Yunnan will send to the coast
forty million bunches of bananas a year, as well as valu-
able cargoes of mangoes and the delightful ruby-red man-
gosteens, which last must have been the apple of Eden,
for it is the choicest fruit known to mankind. A coast
road will eventually run from Canton to Amoy, through
the British territory at Kowloon, and from Wuchow on
the West River a road will run one hundred miles north
to the world's richest quicksilver deposit at Kai Chau.
As these roads have been wisely planned to run at right
angles to the rivers and canals, with the exception of
the road which follows the Grand Canal from Tientsin
to Soochow, the transportation facilities of the empire
will be immediately doubled. The additional wealth
which will be added to the property of Chinese shippers
when the railway supersedes the canal in that hot country,
can be computed when it is stated that it is necessary
now to allow the tremendous waste of twelve per cent, for
shrinkage on grain compared with the allowance neces-

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 297

sary in America 01 only one-fourth of one per cent.
These railways are being built at a cost of thirty-six thou-
sand dollars a mile, which is four thousand dollars less
than America's cheapest built railway, the Great North-
ern, cost.

A nation which has erected the greatest, costliest, and
most enduring monument ever raised by human hands
(the Great Wall, which they call the Wan Li Chang,
myriad mile wall) can, when it rises in the same numbers,
cover its valleys with a web of railways, and as America
held the eyes of the world in the nineteenth century be-
cause of her progress, China confidently expects that the
twentieth century will likewise be hers, as Africa will
take the twenty-first. With all this proposed develop-
ment, China will even then remain only scratched.
There is hardly a word concerning a railway into
old Shansi Province, which is as large as Michigan.
For hundreds of miles, under the loess deposited on the
plateaus centuries ago by the Yellow River and its tribu-
taries, and which can be dragged down with a rake, ex-
tend vast veins of anthracite and bituminous coal and
iron. The mines have been known for thousands of
years to the Mongols, as compared with America's know-
ledge of anthracite dating back only to 1791. Camel
trains of coal, and small articles made of excellent carbon
iron, have been sent to the capital of the province and
to Peking for many years. Erosion for centuries has
been uncovering the seams for the pick of the twentieth
century Chinese miner, as he digs his way into pre-
eminent opulence and power. The only thorough min-
eralogical survey of the inexhaustible coal and iron de-
posits of the central provinces was made in 1870 by
the Russian Richtofen at the suggestion and with funds

298 THE CHINESE

secured through the Shanghai American Mr. Cunning-
ham. In those days American diplomacy was dominant
at Peking through the power of Minister Burlingame.
A railway from the capital, Thai Yuan, would have to
be surveyed along the Fuen River to the Yellow River
and thence to the Grand Canal, and enterprise could read-
ily make the richer portion of this Croesus province of the
north tributary to Europeanized Shanghai, instead of
Peking, which latter could still supply herself abundantly
from the nearer Ping Ting coal mines in the north section.
It is to be noted that the coal areas of China are gener-
ally distributed, while in America the possession of coal
only in the central east has retarded the growth of the
west. On the railways now in use, especially inland, it
has been necessary to use colored glass in the coaches,
as the coolies, who are unfamiliar with anything besides
shell-lights, in their excitability over the passing scenes,
frequently jam their heads through the windows, whose
existence they are not aware of. European engine
drivers have been dispensed with, and natives now do
the work at a wage of thirty cents gold a day. As illus-
trating what Chinese labor can work for I would say that
at Hong-Kong in 1903 we got the cost of handling cargo
on the American mail ships down to the lowest point
ever reached, of seven cents a ton, against forty cents
in America. Most of the railway travel is fourth class,
standing room only being provided in gondola cars
(some with a roof but no sides) at one cent a mile.
First-class fare, with a leather seat, is three cents a mile
on the railroads, and one cent for fifteen miles on the
native house-boats where human feet propel the tread-
wheel. Freight rates on the railroads for rice are two
and nine-tenths of a cent; machinery two and three-

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 299

tenths; coal one and eight-tenths of a cent gold per ton
per mile, against an average rate in the United States
of less than eight-tenths of a cent per ton per mile, and
in England of two and sixteen one hundredths cents.
It is not surprising therefore that the net profit of the
Peking-Han-kau Railway in 1908 was thirty-one per
cent, and that the members of the finance Pu (Board)
want more railways. As- illustrating the industrial status
of China at present a study of the freight carried by the
Shan-tung Railway reveals coal as the chief factor, fol-
lowed in order by beans, oil, cotton, straw-goods and
crockery. When the average Chinese makes a shipment,
it is generally a " personally accompanied " one, and the
railway thus secures a third-class fare in addition to
the freight.

In condemnation proceedings, the price paid for land
is about twenty-eight dollars an acre, or five dollars per
mao; and single graves, which are scattered everywhere,
like sage-bush in the desert, are purchased at two dollars
and a half each, including the value of Fungshui! For
earthwork, two and one- fourth cents; and for rock bal-
lasting eighteen cents per cubic yard, is paid to the con-
tractors. Ties of Japanese kuriwood, which last without
creosoting for six years, cost forty cents each. Track
laying is done for about three cents per lineal yard. One
oddity which would appal our railway commissioners,
is the obliteration of class rates when merchants club
together and hire a car. They may put in it any class
of freight they desire, the rate being charged on the basis
of second class.

The advantage accorded and always demanded by the
Japanese is illustrated on the railway from the treaty
port of Swatow to the prefectural city of Chao Chow Fu,

3oo THE CHINESE

the concession for which was given to Chang Yu Nan,
a wealthy local merchant. All material is being sup-
plied by Japanese contractors, no public tenders having
been invited. The engineers are all Japanese and the
rolling stock was bought through Japanese Manufactur-
ers' Agents.

To summarize the principal railway routes which will
be well under way within ten years, imagine a central
trunk railway from Ottawa to New Orleans; and routes
from New Orleans to Oklahoma; El Paso to Kansas
City; Austin to Oklahoma; Galveston to Oklahoma; New
Orleans to Tallahassee, and Halifax to New York, and
you will comprehend the initial extensive program.
What effect China's action in adopting a four foot, eight
and a half inch gage will exercise on the Indian and
Burmese Railways, remains to be seen. Fifteen thousand
miles of railway in India are five feet, six inch gage, and
the remaining twelve thousand miles are three feet, three
and three-eighth inch gage. From an operating point
of view, China should probably have followed the broader
Indian gage. When India built her railways, she had
steamship connection alone in mind for through busi-
ness. That the Chinese are not lacking in that imagina-
tion which makes countries commercially great, is evi-
denced by the expectation that the Peking-Kalgan Rail-
way will be extended through arid Gobi Desert, and join
Koren through the Kaikhta Pass with Irkutsk, thus
saving six days to St. Petersburg as compared with the
South Manchurian Railway route, now dominated by the
selfish Japanese. It will be remembered that before the
opening of the Suez Canal, Kaikhta was the mart through
which China traded with Russia. Humanity at large is
interested in the rapid extension of Chinese railways,

Prince (Thing, who has been the " Power Behind Three Manchu

Thrones." This conservative of conservatives surprisingly

has alone advocated most advanced views for the

education of Chinese women.

Nanking road, principal native shopping district of Shanghai,
Eastern Central China.

The wide streets of the Northern Cities. Street bazaar on Kaiser

road, running from South Gate to Chien Men Gate,

Peking, China.

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 301

because it will then alone be possible to rush supplies from
the fields of plenty to the famine districts of the three
flooding rivers, the Hoang-ho; Han, and Yangtze, and
save verily hundreds of thousands of lives each year.

Many may be surprised that the railways came with
such a rush, but the way was prepared by the extensive
system of telegraph wires which the Danes under Scheirn
strung through the kingdom, even crossing Yunnan into
Burmah. All the ports' are connected, the total wirage
being forty thousand miles. The most sensational line of
wire in the world probably is that crossing the Gobi
Desert in Mongolia, three thousand and five hundred
miles through a generally hopeless stretch of blight and
immemorial neglect. Over all this expanse of silence;
over the ears of the trudging pony and camel and their al-
most as obtuse drivers ; over the solitary shadow of a gla-
cial rock here and there, how the songs of the glad parts
of the earth are humming in the dreams of the half-awak-
ened giantess, China. The profit to the government from
the wires in 1907 was twelve per cent., and again the
Finance Pu wants more of them. Only fifteen feet be-
low the sands of Gobi there is water which, if raised,
would turn the earth's saddest desert into the lilac and
the buttercup.

The I Chau, or Imperial Courier Service, with its
thousands of wonderful runners, and an organization
running through four thousand years, will continue long
aifter railways are built, but more like our rural postal
service. These runners claim as a regular thing records
that surpass Marathon, and it is a pity that some of them
were not sent to the Olympic games. A Chinese track
victory would win the popular sympathy of the world
more than would the bloody laurels of a fleet of war.

302 THE CHINESE

From Peking to Canton one hundred miles a day over
abominable paths, are expected of the relay runners.

There is already a postal service, called the Min Chu,
which radiates from the treaty ports, which was estab-
lished by the always ready Robert Hart for the Chinese.

Travelers who have enjoyed the comfort of the
wide, cool seat of a high-wheeled yellow Macao
jinrickisha, once used generally throughout South China
treaty ports, will lament the Japanese invasion of China
with a lighter, narrower, plum-lacquered 'rickisha, which
has already driven out the Chinese vehicle at Hong-Kong
and Shanghai. The coolies, who work for public contrac-
tors and do not own their own vehicles, will have nothing
to do with the heavier Chinese machines, but occasionally,
in the Portuguese Colony, pulled along the Praya Grande
by her liveried runners, a gentle Macaense, hid beneath
her flowing black silk Do-veil, passes you in a 'rickisha
of the old period, which rumbles along with its echoes
of slower, quainter and courtlier days, which will soon
be a memory throughout the whole awakened land. The
revulsion which comes over one on first stepping into a
human-drawn 'rickisha, will not quickly pass. It is hard
for a Westerner to degrade his fellow-man so literally
to the position of a driven beast. The Oriental refutes
this point of view, and says, " I am the more honest in
practising that we all are servants of one another."
However, there is no other means of moving about the
streets of Japan and the maritime cities of China. Hong-
Kong has a tramway, but it traverses only one water
street, — their Praya. Manila has a more ramified tram
service, but waits are so long that there also the imported
Japanese runner and his vehicle are indispensable. The
private 'rickishas of Hong-Kong are pulled by one runner

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 303

and pushed by two, the salary of the three amounting to
eighteen dollars gold a month. The rivalry of the own-
ers in equipping their runners with uniforms of conspicu-
ous borders is one of the characteristic features of life on
that famous oriental island.

More significant than the 'rickisha invasion was the
announcement of President Matsugata of the Kawasaki
Dock, Kobe, that his company had purchased ten thou-
sand tsubo of land at Shanghai for the purpose of erect-
ing a branch in China, and competing for the ship work
of the Yangtze territory. This was going far afield
for an unprovoked attack, \ not only on Chinese but
British capital and political sphere. This commercial in-
vasion has not been one-sided, for China has now found
in Japan her best customer, selling her last year sixty
million taels' worth, mostly of raw material.

The Chinese Imperial Customs duties of five per cent,
ad valorem are probably the smallest of all international
customs imposts, but this tax at the treaty ports was until
lately only the beginning of the load accumulated on im-
ports. An inland tax, under native control, called li-
kin, which literally means a cash a catty (one-twelfth
of a cent for each one and one-third pounds) is generally
added despite the treaties with America, Britain and
Japan, from province to prefecture about every twenty
miles, until the bolt of Fall River arrives at the retailer's
hong or store, as a luxury, and a mandarin t>nly can pur-
chase what the rice-tiller needs to comfort his blistered
shoulders from the sun. Unifying as railways may be,
they will accomplish less than is expected until the likin
absolutely ceases to keep the provinces disjointed. The
great federator of China has therefore yet to arise, and
it will be he who positively smashes for ever the whole

304 THE CHINESE

pythonic chain of the likin system, and thus makes free
inter-provincial trade. It is curious to note that no likin
is levied in Mongolia, probably because the poor camel's
back there has already been broken with the burden of
its debts. Next in revenue-producing powers to the land
tax, comes the likin, and the Imperial Customs following
a long way off with a total of about twenty-five million
dollars. The necessities of the provinces, owing to an
abolishment of likin, could be at once met by a tax on
mines and profits from railways, without adding to the
burdens of the farmer or shopkeeper, one cash more than
at present.

The governor of far Shensi Province has drifted into
the Japanese eddy, and is exploiting the oil wells of Yen
Chang, which employ Japanese engineers. The oil re-
fines in the highest grade. The Pennsylvania of China
in coal and oil is that most populous inland province, Sze-
Chuen, where the natural gas flows through rude bamboo
tubes. The wondering natives, leading it beneath their
salt evaporating pans, have put Japanese matches to it,
and called it " devil's breath." Encouraged by the suc-
cess in industrial developments of Viceroy Chang at
Han-kau, China has loaned the governor of Chinese
Turkestan one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars
to establish a cotton mill in the far eastern corner c*f the
empire at Turf an to beat out Russian goods.

The nineteen Chinese mints are entirely under provin-
cial jurisdiction, though the central government steps in,
as in 1906, when the Kiang Nam mint over-produced
copper fun coins. It is the viceroy's perquisite, though
he is sometimes followed closely by the counterfeiters,
who smuggle in strips of Australian copper, and export
the " moonshine " stampings for tutenag, into the interior

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 305

provinces whose mintings are the lowest. A Chinese
shroff in ? bank, and the native croupier at a fan-tan
game are experts in the ring of true coin. They care
nothing for the stamp, whether it be Mexican, Spanish,
Chinese, or Hong-Kong, so long as the coin is pure silver.
So little respect is paid the provincial coin of the two
Kwang Provinces in the south, that banking houses put
their " chops " or seals on the dollar pieces, which are
dented in their passage into unrecognizable cup-shaped
articles. The Hong-Kong government is endeavoring
to teach the Chinese respect for the head and inscription
on coins of the realm, and will not receive at the post
and tax offices any coins of the king which are
" chopped."

The sycee of commerce is the perfectly pure silver
which is melted at the mint into bars from the Mexican,
Spanish, American and Chinese coins that are received
in toll at the haikwan or custom-house on a bullion basis.
The silver bars so produced are officially called wan-yin
or " fine silver," and colloquially se-sze (fine silk), imply-
ing that the metal is so pure that it can be drawn out in
a thread as fine as silk. The Chinese very naturally fall
into the decimal system. Their monetary computation is
as follows: ten copper cash or li (which have a square
hole in the center and Chinese characters on one side and
Mongolian characters on the other side) equal one fun;
ten fun equal one tsicn; ten tsien equal one tael, and a
haikwan or custom-house tael equals seventy-four cents
in our money. A string of one thousand cash is known
popularly as a tiao, and is equal to fifty cents gold.
The bar of sycee is sold as being of so many taels in
weight. The cash coin, known as far back as one thou-
sand years B. C, is the most generally coined, and shows

3o6 THE CHINESE

the minute economy of the Chinese in their commercial
dealings with one another. Their economists argue that
if we had a lower coin than the cent, our households
would live on half what they do, as shopkeepers charge
the poor a cent for what is worth only a twelfth, and
the poor in America as well as China of course live from
hand to mouth. A Chinese silver dollar and dime piece
are coined in the two Kwang Provinces in the south, but
their stamp gives them no fixed value. They are only
bullion when challenged at the haikwan. The Kiang-
nam mint issued in 1906 fun pieces of Yunnan cop-
per, but they were unpopular, and were withdrawn when
the markets took them at a discount. At Kashgar in
Chinese Turkestan, copper is cast into ingots and used
as money alongside of the silver sycee bar.

The notes of private banks, called " flying money," are
in wide use, though the advertisement on the back re-
quests circulation only in the guild district or hong street.
The bank has to give security to the viceroy for its note
issues. There is little counterfeiting because part of the
note is written by hand and an impression copy is taken
for comparison on presentation. Until 1909, not since
1300 A. D., has the government itself issued treasury
notes. These" notes have been prepared in America.
There was much scandal about abuses when the Mongols
issued paper, one being that the government discounted
its own obligations. An old government note of the
Mings, dated 1368, is on exhibition in New York. It
reads in part : " This seal makes this note current any-
where under heaven. Counterfeiters will be executed.
Persons giving information will be rewarded with two
hundred and fifty taels and all the property of the coun-
terfeiter." Only China and Persia of the greater coun-

4%^^!^
'Jw^wi rt> i

ftK?aftmg
PI7\Jj?l\l ^

i».-ji-* "5*5 aTtrX ? —

» S - ;7 ' - "~3 -1 ?=f "•? •«;

Hi |P il| ? |

'• • :l""t I ^ ~^^^.'' - " r

fif\

-; -r "" ^. r . -?

^%f

c^, ',--•- ;,^--
3W * r ~ ^.

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 307

tries of the world now remain on a silver basis. Gold is
not coined. The dust and virgin nuggets, known as
" Huang-huo," are washed from alluvial sand in river
beds in Szechuen. In Kwangsi, the next province west
from Canton, much business is carried on by the barter
of cotton yarn. An early Chinese coin was made of
porcelain, three and one-half inches across by one-fourth
inch thick, bearing the legend, " Eternal prosperity."
As China mines little silver, in times of depression of
imports, bolts of silk, blocks of dried tea, Mongol riding-
boots, and even baked earth and wooden disks bearing
the viceroy's chop, have been the circulating medium.
The early Buddhistic writings frequently mention the
last named money, as the priests did not like to horde it,
both from want of room and want of appreciation, which
criticism of theirs naturally made them unpopular with
the vice-regal inscriber of the " chop." When railways
facilitate circulation, we shall see another oppression
wiped away, namely the exorbitant interest rate of four
per cent, a month, which obtains at feast times and New
Year settlements in February. Besides the fokis on
watch, the bankers' safe is guarded by five padlocks, each
requiring a different key, which is carried by each mem-
ber of the firm, so that all must be present in order to
open the safe. The rate of interest at the pawnshops
is thirty-six per cent, a year. To protect these shops in
a land where there is little police protection, the penalty
for robbery has been made death. Rocks are stored on
the roof so that they may be thrown down on an attack-
ing band. The pawnshops are the most conspicuous
buildings in the cities; they rise high and square, like
forts, over every other roof and pinnacle.

Small native newspapers have cropped up all over,

3o8 THE CHINESE

and Japanese money is being expended to swing this
important influence in line with Japanese prestige. On
this field of tournament will meet the progressive mer-
chants, traders, and foreign-educated Chinese, against
the old-school literati and official classes. Cartoons have
a wider circulation and are in systematic employment by
secret societies and guilds. A notorious one used
during the boycott of 1905 exhibited Americans goading
their " god-beast," the buffalo, and on the reverse the
same Americans goading a Chinese.

Quail are raised tame by the Chinese, and shipped
across the Pacific seven thousand miles. This bird ranks
eighth in the heraldic embroideries. It would have been
given a higher place were it not trained to fight in the
gaming pit. Fish are likewise brought alive across the
Pacific, this being a perquisite of the ship's Chinese
bo'sun. The beautiful rice-birds, yellow as Hartz canar-
ies, are caught in nets and drowned so that they will not
lose weight in struggling. They are hawked around the
streets of Hong-Kong. The Cantonese have long been
famous for their delicious preserved little oranges, the
comquats. They are now exporting pickled olives, which
compete in California with the local product. A New
Yorker can buy in Mott Street tinned rice-birds from
Canton's suburbs.

Over three-quarters of the uplands of China have not
been utilized because she has few cattle and fewer
sheep. Vast herds of Swiss stock could be grazed on
the mountain uplands which at present are given up to
scenery for Buddhist temples, or empty glebes for the
Fungshui nonsense. Japan is importing blooded stock
as rapidly as her thin resources will allow, and as China
will do everything Japan does, a vast accretion of China's

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 309

wealth in herds will shortly ensue. A Canadian imported
a flock of sheep and set them free on the islands which
guard Junk Bay, Hong-Kong, but the spear grass of the
southern sea-coast lacerated the windpipes of the ani-
mals. The half v/ild cattle of the Canton delta, with
their pronounced hump, look like diminutive buffaloes.
Their faces are even gentler looking than our Jersey
breed. A windmill seems a little thing, but China will
need a million of them to take the place of the irrigation-
wheel treaders who will be called from the fields to the
mine pits within the next five years. Will America or
Germany supply the million windmills to sing their
music beside the Chinese homesteads?

The Manchurians crush vast quantities of beans by
donkey-driven rollers. The oil is used for food and
light. The cake which remains is used partly for food
and partly for fertilizer. Vast as is the quantity of pe-
troleum now imported into China, it has made so little
impression on the absorbent ability of the nation, that
even yet, everywhere one goes, little else is noticed but
the use of vegetable oils, — on the 'rickisha's shafts, on
the sampan's masthead, in the huts of the rice tiller and
mulberry picker, and at the idol's shrine. The popular
illuminating oil is produced from the nut of one species
of tea-plant. Ground nuts, or peanuts are crushed in
vast quantities for the oil. Two million gallons of nut-
oil are imported annually into America for use in
the manufacture of high grade varnishes. This rapidly
drying, tasteless, but rank-smelling oil, which has no su-
perior for water-proof requirements, is made from the
purple-leafed Hwa Tung tree (Aleurites cordata). Sze-
chuen Province cultivates it abundantly in the West. It
is a common sight to meet coolies carrying the nuts in

3io THE CHINESE

bamboo boxes on their shoulders, and not slung between
them on bamboos, as is the universal method of carriage
in the east. On the coast, Fu-chau is the best known
center. The product is there drawn from the gorges of
the picturesque Min River. In the next province west,
the hills along the Kan River are clothed with the trees,
and the capital Nan Chang turns over a busy cash in the
enterprise. The trees which grow in stony ground, bear
in six years, when they reach a height of fifteen feet.
Oddly the pressure on the poisonous nuts is not applied
by a screw as is done with olives by us, but by wedges,
which surprisingly express forty per cent, of the fifty per
cent, oil which the nuts contain.

Manchuria promises to become wonderfully successful
in the culture of the sugar beet, and with her cheap labor
probably will conquer in wider fields across the Pacific.
The Manchurian beets contain thirty per cent, of sugar,
against a percentage in our country of eighteen per
cent.

All of Kwangtung produces that delightful succulent
orange, famous throughout the East, known as the
" Coolie " orange. It is thin-skinned, slightly smaller,
but fully as juicy as our Indian River variety. The skins
are sedulously preserved and sold to make a tea to cure
fevers. Indeed, in the treaty ports, the fruit is called
the " Quinine orange." Mangoes, despite their strong
turpentine taste, grow upon the palate. The small-pitted
lychee, with its cool, sweet flesh of pearl color, can not be
over-praised in a land where the longing for fruit is in-
tense on account of the poor quality of foods available
for the use of the white man, and the salicylic acid in
imported foods. The yellow-skinned whampee, fragrant
as a flower, has a taste between a plum and a grape. The

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 311

pumelo or giant grape-fruit grows to enormous size, and
is preferable to our shard because of its mildness.

The egg-shaped and ink-red persimmons, together with
golden limes from Hainan Island, add to the varied
colored piles on the fruiterers' stands, in a picture the
most welcome that the Orient presents amid all its for-
bidding dirt and smells.

On the hills around Canton lie the terraces where the
succulent ginger root is cultivated. The scene is a pretty
one, for not only are the flowers attractive, but the long
leaf gleams brilliantly in the sun. The street of the
syrup workers in Canton, where the ginger is preserved
and candied, affords an interesting excursion. The most
notable firm is the Chai Loong, of which Wong Ki Sam
is the versatile president.

When some machine shall be invented for taking the:
gum more cheaply out of the ramie stems, the product
will add vastly to China's wealth. This nettle gives four
crops a year, producing two and a half tones of fiber to
the acre, and the cloth is well known for its silky finish
and quality of adding luster when mixed with wool or
cotton.

So long as rice continues to be the major staff of life,
there is little hope for foreign agricultural implements,
and the buffalo continues to wallow through the flooded
fields, dragging the wooden cultivator. Hong-Kong has
erected its first flour-mill, however, with a capacity of
one thousand barrels a day. The grain will be brought
eight days by sea from Manchuria, and also imported
from Oregon. Electricity developed from reservoirs in
the hills back of Junk Bay, eight miles from Hong-Kong's
civic center, will be used. Hong-Kong has not supplied
Vladivostock and Manchuria since the Russian- Japanese

312 THE CHINESE

War. She has been devoting her abilities to supplying
South China with a low grade imported Oregon flour at
two cents a pound. For the finer festival cakes, the Chi-
nese have of late been importing slightly superior Austra-
lian and Alberta flours. The Chinese does not yet appre-
ciate, or at least he could not pay for Minnesota flour.
At Chin Kiang on the Grand Canal, there is another na-
tive flour-mill which rolls a good product at two cents a
pound, and Shanghai has several mills. In the na-
tive mills, the nether stone revolves, while the upper is
stationary. More mills will certainly be erected, and
grain be brought from Manchuria, the West River in the
south, and across the Pacific. The former unassailed
position of rice, we are glad to say, is now doomed to be
attacked. The native cotton-mills, located at Wuchang
by Viceroy Chang, are manufacturing all the uniforms
for the new Chinese army of the central provinces.

Land is leased from the government, and the right of
occupancy is evidenced by a Hung Ki or red deed, but
the people exchange land among themselves by a private
and unregistered white deed, because they wish to escape
the expense of the government deeds. There are few
suits over the white deeds, which speaks volumes for the
famed honesty of the Chinese peasant. When new land
is broken, the government allows six crops (two seasons)
to be reaped, before calling for the first taxes, and in
times of famine all taxes are remitted. Taxes are never
over fifty cents an acre, and descend to ten cents an acre
for hill land. China exacts no direct tax in Thibet. She
collects yearly a nominal tribute from the central gov-
ernment at Lhassa. Thibet, however, has to support
the resident minister sent from Peking. Taxation is not
always collected in money, but sometimes in tithing of

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 313

produce, the rice being stored in government granaries.
China is the only country that in this way is repeating
the picturesque history of Joseph and the Pharaohs, in
the storing of grain against famine by the government.
Americans will best remember the five granaries at Can-
ton, and the even larger ones at Peking. The peasants
of China do not bear the burdens of those of Japan,
where one-third of the revenue goes to the government.

There are few additional sources of revenue. Provin-
cially, the pawnshops' licenses, and the likin on transpor-
tation help out. The customs, salt excise, and the loti
(tea export duty) further assist the general government.
A citizen of China can boast of enjoying two of the
several essentials of liberty, that to be well governed is
to hear little of it, and pay little for it. When China's
mines are sunk, and her factories are erected, she can
afford one of the heaviest budgets in the world, pro-
vided the people continue in their individual economic
habits and temperance. She owes her vast population
to two causes: low taxation and early marriages. A
reorganization in the system of collection could yield
the government even now two hundred and ten millions
from the land tax; the customs yield of about twenty-
five millions could be brought up to one hundred millions
if likin was absolutely wiped out. The loti, as well as
the likin tax should be abolished. Government royalties
on mining, and the receipts from railways, could bring
up the revenue of China to the enormous amount of five
hundred millions a year, without making the poor of
the land poorer, and it must be remembered that life is
decreed, or a knell sounded, for a state, as it turns on
this one problem: will the poor be made poorer or the
rich richer ? They can not both be made richer and either

3i4 THE CHINESE

live, as is the fatuous statement to-day of certain of
our " endowed " professors of economics.

There are Building and Loan Associations in China,
called Tei Po Wui (Spread on the Ground Associa-
tions) because the historic founder who first borrowed
from his friends was so poor that he had neither hut nor
bench where to ask them to sit while the loan should be
discussed.

The government's salt monopoly is a great burden
upon a people who require so much of the staple for one
of their main foods, fish. Indeed, in oriental countries
where icing is not yet practical, the necessity of salt and
sugar as preservatives is imperative. The cost averages
throughout the empire two cents a pound, whereas it
should be sold for half that. The monopoly mainly cov-
ers evaporation privileges along the sea-coast, and the
product being granular, is not so good as the residue
from boiling. These sea-water beds are all in the north-
ern provinces. Evaporation is permitted when three
inches of water are pumped into the vast basins. The
salt is packed in five hundred pound mats. This un^
purified salt accounts partially for the rank smells of the
dried fish-markets. When the Indian government re-
duced the salt tax ten millions a year, the progress of
India commenced, until her solvency is now assured.
Poor China is praying for similar relief. In the toe of
northern Shensi Province, is situated the ancient and re-
markable walled salt lake, fifty miles square, which sup-
ports a Civil Service city of seventy-five thousand
inhabitants, who tend the pans for the government.
Many more salt and brackish springs could be reclaimed
at this point. At similar springs at Fung Tu in Szechuen
Province, natural gas is piped in hollowed bamboos to

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 315

the pans. No salt is imported. The present consump-
tion in the empire is the tremendous amount of one mil-
lion, nine hundred thousand metric tons. Junks seized
in the act of salt smuggling are drawn up on the shore
or bank and sawn in twain, as a melancholy deterrent of
similar delinquency. The Chinese dearly loves his ethics
in pictures, and the government seizes the eloquent op-
portunity.

\Yhere wood is scarce and paper so necessary, the sup-
ply of pulp is becoming a matter of anxiety. Expecta-
tion is turned toward the bamboo (Kam Li} which grows
as much as five feet in a night until a growth of fifty feet
is attained in the humid southern provinces. What more
need we say for the soil of China? Planted as a hedge
between the rice fields, it frames as soft and alluring a
scene as the imagination can paint. How wonderful this
plant, which furnishes in its tender shoots and seeds, food
for man ; in its larger growth, poles for his hut and masts
for his junks; in its fiber, paper for his kettles and print-
ing press; and medicine in the silicious nodules of the
joints! It is split into fibers in Korea, lacquered black,
and woven into the astounding hats which the quality of
that land wear. It is wound to make the immense haw-
sers which pull the boats through the Ichang Gorge of the
Yangtze, and which suspend the bridges over the gorges
between Thibet and Szechuen Province.

The stalks of the two-year-old bamboo, cut into one-
inch lengths, are thrown into a pond or clay vat, where
they are allowed to decompose for four months. An oily
scum collects on the top, which is discarded, but some day
it will be purified and used commercially. The pulp is
then pounded by hydraulic or hand hammers. A bind-
ing material, made from the leaves of the holly-like Ac-

316 THE CHINESE

tinidia or Lauraceae, is mixed in, and the paper is cut,
dried and pressed into the sizes desired. The Japanese
have already erected at Toroku in Formosa, an immense
modern paper-mill, which uses bamboo entirely as staple.
The so-called velvety but frailer " rice-paper," used for
those dainty little paintings, with humorous Pidgin
verses, at Canton, is only the pith of the Fatsia elder of
the Yunnan marshes, the cells of which are cut length-
wise and ironed. Into so many lines of industry does
the bamboo enter, that lacking as yet the production of
iron and lumber, the plant may be said to be the frame-
work of China. Throughout Kiangsi Province, it is
used to construct the water-wheels of the irrigation canals.
Even saucepans and kettles are made of the compressed
pulp, which is treated with secret salts. The pans, how-
ever, must be kept nearly full of water, which is brought
to a boil with surprising rapidity. Medium sized bamboo
has been introduced on Bainbridge Island, Washington
State, and has reached a growth of five feet. If this at-
tempt of the Furuyas firm is successful in furniture
making, they will introduce the lumber bamboo, in which
America has an opportunity to relieve the destruction
of her forests throughout the southern states.

On foot-power looms, in their own homes, the Chinese
weave three hundred different patterns of silk and satin
goods. Most entrancing are the embroidered goods, on
which a woman (often the deserted wife of an opium
fiend) will work a month and receive three dollars. The
merchant will sell you this mandarin's robe, with its
Greek-like spangles of geometrical patterns, or its orna-
ments of trellises, chrysanthemums, fruit or butterflies,
for fifteen dollars. Were you to sell it in your own land,
you would receive one hundred dollars. That robe will

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 317

be exhibited in homes and galleries. Its pattern will
teach industries to our art schools. Over the world the
power of its beauty will spread. But whatever commer-
cially results, or aesthetically emanates from the creation,
nothing whatever will reach that woman of Hang-chow,
who received her all in the three dollars. To the altar of
art the women of China have bound themselves that
beauty may not die. The world piles up its debts, even
though the piling up be done in secret places in neglected
lands. The death of a generation can not outlaw them.
Some day we shall have to pay that woman of Hang-
chow, or her heirs of suffering, what we owe her, just as,
for one instance, the labor unions of England are now col-
lecting what their forefathers owed Wat Tyler and his
Kentishmen, when they commandeered their arms, their
service and their poll-taxed bodies in 1381, without rec-
ompense.

The United States does not produce one-third of the
wool she requires and she therefore draws on North
China for nearly three million dollars' worth a year,
which is about China's complete exportation of the
product. The export is, of course, through the port of
Tientsin.

On the iron hills around Canton and Macao, you will
notice drying in the sun, the delightfully soft grass linen
which has been dyed with the blue " Polygonum tinc-
torium." If you wander into the sheds where the silk-
worms are feeding, they will beseech you to make no
noise, this odd requirement being quite necessary in seri-
culture. If the raising and feeding of the grub are tedi-
ous, the procuring of the skein from the cocoon is simplic-
ity itself. Let us enter a reeler's house. There is no un-
necessary furniture in the working-room. On the adobe

3i8 THE CHINESE

floor lie the bits of charcoal and precious pieces of drift-
wood gathered from every nook of the fields and canal.
There is the bamboo basket which brought them, and a
tray where he assorts the cocoons. The skein itself
makes the circumference around two crossed frames
which revolve. The fire pot is of stone and is without a
door. It rests on a rock. The Han-yang copper pot is
wide and shallow. Into it the cocoons are thrown with a
wooden spoon. With his right hand the reeler works
four or five to the edge, gathers deftly the ends of five wet
threads and lets the cocoons drop back into the hot water.
In the ancient Portuguese settlement of Macao you pass
the lofty Boa Vista Hotel, with its Renaissance beauty
alien enough here, and saunter westward along the Rua
de Penha, beneath the hill toward which Portuguese navi-
gators for five centuries have looked for succor. On
each side of you are high walls, cut with gates which bear
noble white stucco ornaments, and arms above them, and
a wonderful iron lamp which looks more like the art of
crusaders than the hand-work of Chinese. You pass Fort
Bomparto, erected by Lopez Carrasco in 1615. At your
feet is a small half-moon bay as blue as Naples; at the
other horn is the fort of Sao Thiago de Barra, with its
big-bellied cannon, obsolete, but delightfully quaint.
There are home-cast copper cannon, too, and blue-domed
white sentry boxes, which look more like lighthouses of a
miniature past. You are recalling the Dutch invasion
which was repulsed on this silver beach in 1622. If you
can evade a cordon of yellow chow dogs, every one of
which you would like to take home as a prize, you will
reach a series of terraces, on each of which are crowded
dozens of huts. This is the ancient village of the native
fire-cracker makers. Take up some of the torn paper

The Manchu Regent of China, Prince Chun, brother of tne late
Emperor, Kwang Sn, and father of infant Emperor-
elect Hsuan Tung.

6oo miles inland at Hankow, Central China. The Yang-tze and

Han rivers, which meet here, rise forty feet in the spring

floods. Hankow is the Pittsburg of China, for here

meet the opulent antimony, coal and iron beds of

Hupeh province. It is also the center of the

black tea trade, and the head of deep water

navigation on the Yang-tze river.

The busy Metropolis of China, Canton, as seen from the Hong Kong

boat wharf. Canton has had an uninterrupted trade with

foreigners for 450 years, despite the intriguing

of Peking to end the intercourse.

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 319

lying about, which is used for stuffing the crackers. The
text is in Chinese, and the translation reveals the fulmina-
tions of Amos against the heathen, copies of which have
been handed out in thousands by the Christian colpor-
teurs. Buckwheat paste is rolled in the fuse; straw and
every possible refuse is used to make the cheap paper.
Each child or woman prepares two thousand five hundred
crackers a day, for which she receives ten cents. More
of the earth of China is scattered over the Americas than
the soil of all other lands together. Chinese humorists
say they are anointing us unto the conquest. The middle
and ends of each fire-cracker are sealed with Chinese red
clay. In China, however, the fire-cracker is only used
in religious ritual, for the purpose of frightening away
evil spirits.

Where a stream, now almost dried up, once rushed
between the loess foot-hills of Kowloon, across the bay
from Hong-Kong, is situated a village of soy-makers.
The stream has sunk down from a dozen levels as the
forests which fed it have been uprooted at its source, until
now it whispers deep in a sunken gorge. From terrace
to terrace, the high bamboo water-wheels patiently feed
the irrigation bamboo and mud troughs. There are two
narrow terraces on each side of the highest level. Above
are the hills with their waving camphor-trees. Behind
the bamboo fences you will notice the bean poles, and the
great earthenware pots, where the bean liquor is fer-
mented, and stirred for two months in the blazing sun
until it is black. The beans are skinned and made into
a flour, into which gypsum is mixed. Salt and secret
things are added to make this appetizing soy, which those
who have learned the taste prefer to the flavored Worces-
tershire, of which it is the base. The soy costs only a

320 THE CHINESE

trifle, and the workman who earns only ten cents a day
will have it at his meal. The wealthy are equally proud
of their national " abettor of appetite."

An odd pursuit on the plateaus of western Szechuen
Province is the gathering of musk, which is worth more
than its weight in gold. The product comes from a gland
in the stomach of the hornless deer, which stands only
twenty inches high, and whose habitat is never lower
than eight thousand feet.

In computing the future of Chinese exports, one must
consider the eight million Chinese abroad, who are be-
coming wealthier, and are sending to their native land
for the things to which they have been used, and which
they passionately love.

Cornwall and Malay were supposed to contain all the
deposits of the world's tin until the mines of Bolivia, ten
thousand feet up the Andes, were uncovered recently. It
may surprise many that the fastnesses of distant Yun-
nan Province conceal ancient mines at Kuo Chia, which,
working on the most primitive methods in the alluvial
deposits formed by erosion, produce to-day one hundred
thousand picitls a year (13,333,000 pounds), valued at
twenty-two cents a pound at the mines, before the pay-
ment of the export loti imposed by China. These mines
are near the Tonquin border and the proposed French
railway which will have one Chinese port at Pak Hoi will
profit by the carriage of this freight, which now is ex-
ported to Hong-Kong. The tin averages as high as
sixty-five per cent., there being little wolfram and mis-
pickel in the ore, which is run through sluices after the
larger stones have been picked out of the muddy gravel.
The metal is run in pigs weighing one hundred and forty-
six pounds, which are cut in half for convenience in

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 321

packing on donkey back. The furnaces consume wood as
fuel. The blowing apparatus is most primitive. Each
coolie worker is expected to produce one kilogram of tin
a day. Some of this tin is used at Swatow in making
the celebrated pewter ware, the antimony coming from
the particularly rich mines of Hunan. Changsha, the
capital of that province, has two native smelting estab-
lishments, and Carlowitz and Company, the well known
Hamburg firm, run a large smelting plant at Wuchang.

Ten miles from the British military and sanitarium
settlement of Wei-hai-wei, five hundred feet above the
sea, shafts have been sunk by foreign companies into
oxidized ore which carries free gold. The wages paid
muckers are fifteen cents gold, and miners twenty cents
gold a day. The native miners used to break the ore
small by hand, and then throw it into a bean mill under
stone rollers. The free gold was panned out by the use
of quicksilver. The rocks of the neighborhood are of
volcanic origin, traversed by seismic intrusion, and also
showing signs of erosion.

How rapidly the spear becomes a share is evidenced
already on the Mongolian and Manchurian steppes ad-
jacent to the Siberian Railway. They expect to ship five
hundred thousand sheep to St. Petersburg, and even some
to London, through the port of Riga this summer. The
disbanded soldiers of Kuropatkin are throwing away their
buttons, importing Austrian enameled cooking ware, and
getting to work between the furrows. And far away in
Thibet, where the red banners of Younghusband and the
yellow ones of the Lhama made their kowtows, they have
begun a modern cart road from the fertile lake regions
over the passes to Simla. Bullock and yak wagons, in-
stead of barrows, are now bearing out pashum (fine shawl

THE CHINESE

wool of the Thibetan goat), borax, silk, tea, charras and
sulphur.

We have said that the roads of China are only wide
enough for a barrow, on which the load is generally five
hundred pounds, though in the north of China some bar-
rows carry one thousand pounds. Of several, there is
one venerable exception, dating from the third century,
A. D., and when there is an exception in China, it is on
a gigantic scale. From Peking to Ching Too, the capital
of Szechuen, a distance of one thousand five hundred
miles through the most populous plain of China, there
runs a road built one thousand five hundred years ago.
It is fifteen feet wide, and is paved with large blocks of
stone, some being five feet square. It is, of course, in
wretched condition, taken at spots, but judged as a whole,
there lies the great work ready for easy adjustment to the
present day. The ancient cedars stand sentinel, pointing
piteously to a return to the patriotic public works of yore
by taotais, mandarins and viceroys. The fuyttns
(mayors) are not at fault The scenery, where this
road crosses the Sin Ling range, is on the most stupen-
dous scale, Alpine in its beauty. The engineers cut the
road at eight thousand feet, and the snowy peaks
tower three thousand feet still higher. If one may judge
.the religion of the Chinese Buddhists by the condition
of the roads, it must be at a low ebb, for one of the most
neglected of the Ten Charities is : " He who makes a
piece of road cuts off one thousand dots on the debtor
side of his record with Buddha," Peking's streets, those
sloughs of dust, pitfalls or slime, have lately seen their
first steam roller. Shanghai and Hong-Kong, of course.
preceded Peking in this respect. In the stone-paved na-
tive cities, the sewer is under the middle row of slabs.

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 323

As the flow of water is poor, decaying vegetable matter
makes a malodorous cry to heaven. The sewers are
used for no other filth, however, as all else is carried to
the fields in buckets. Chinese civic philosophy is thankful
therefor, considering that things would be infinitely
worse if the fields did not demand more fertilizer than
is available. There is not an American, however, who
will believe this, when he is caught rounding a lee corner
for the first time.

Since little glass is manufactured (and that only at
Canton), and as porcelain is too costly, and earthenware
too brittle to stand the jolting, it may be asked how their
samschn wine and valuable oils are transported. Large
grass baskets, to support one hundred pounds weight, are
prepared. These are lined with thick bamboo paper,
which is soaked in vegetable oil. Withes of strong grass
are twisted about the bundle, and also around the large
hood which is placed over the orifice. The coolie takes
no risk with this burden, and has it harnessed on a prop,
so that he does not have to put the bundle down each time
he rests against a wall or tree.

More alleviating even than railways is the institution
at last of public utilities in some of the suffering cities.
This is really the breaking of the true dawn, the distinct
form of the sun of comfort itself seen over the horizon
at last. A contract to provide Canton with water-works
at Tsang To has been awarded to a German firm. Up
to the present, Canton has taken her supply from the
polluted river and thousands of city wells, and epidemics
would be even more frequent if the Chinese did not take
most of their drink in boiled tea. The second city to
follow is at the other end of the land, Newchwang letting
a similar contract to a British firm, and even old Peking

324 THE CHINESE

is laying down pipes to bring filtered water from the Sha
and Ching Rivers. We know what Lourdes is in relic
week as a distributor of disease, but the water of Chinese
cities holds a continuous carnival in germs. When the
music of the steam water-pumps is heard in the land,
how many millions will rise upon their couches and say
they have heard indeed the pulsing of the wings of that
good angel which shed healing upon the West. The ob-
ject lesson was afforded by the filtration beds at Tokio,
Osaka and British Hong-Kong. Families too poor to
pay for a faucet in the house are furnished a key to the
street hydrant for seventy-five cents per annum, with the
liability of being swooped down upon by the patrolling
lukong if water is wasted.

Harbors, too, are being improved. It is proposed to
prepare the water-front of historic Whompoa for Can-
ton's revived shipping, and the railway terminal which
will be located there. Even the dizzy old bund of Canton
itself has lately been straightened up before the surveyor's
line. But the other day, two towns off the Tung Ting
Lake opened their black-barred gates to foreign trade, and
the vast hemp fields of sealed Hunan were thus at last
brought to one day's steaming from Han-kau.

The foolish pounding on a wooden cymbal by a watch-
man who noisily dragged along his wooden shoes through
the thief-infested shadows is being replaced by the stealthy
tread of the uniformed, carbine-armed policeman.
Drained boulevards are being broken across the stinking
cities from gate to gate. Something more systematic
than the visits of the wandering sow is depended upon
to clean the streets of garbage. More victorias and auto-
mobiles, full of happy painted wives, are seen, as wider
roads are macadamized in the suburbs of the treaty

MODERN COMMERCE AND BUSINESS 325

ports. Copied from Hong-Kong, the great teacher of
the East, the electric car will run before long out of Can-
ton, up the gorgeous West River (Sikiang) country.
Honest China has at last allowed her impeccable self to
loot the Occident of its inventions, for the sake of the re-
lief it will give her tired sons who were almost buried
in the dirt of the centuries.

VIII

CLIMATE AND DISEASES OF SOUTH CHINA

The stricken British island-colony of Hong-Kong has
learned to welcome those recognized experts, the Japanese
doctors, in the annual visitation of the terrible bubonic
plague, called by the Chinese, Chang-chili. How its
recurrence shrinks history! We read of the curse first
in I Samuel, 6.4; in Thucydides, as occurring at Athens
in 594, B. C. ; and at Rome in the reign of Justinian, A.
D., 542. We have even considered Manzoni's descrip-
tion of it at Milan, and Defoe's and Pepys' accounts of
the "Black Death " in London in September, 1665, as
ancient history. But here is the veritable monster, viru-
lent and steaming, suddenly barring one's path this very
day. A Japanese, Kita Sato, discovered the bacillus in
the epidemic at Hong-Kong in 1894, and since then, the
Japanese physicians have been invited to Canton, Bom-
bay, Singapore and Manila when those ports are visited
by their annual scourges. The Chinese of Hong-Kong
call it Wan Yik (the epidemic), in painful recollection
of the blowing up by the British soldiers in 1894 of the
vast Taeping Shan section, which hole lies under the
beetling brows of Victoria and Davis Peaks.

The most marked contrast between China and Japan,
therefore, is not in arms, manufacturing, or shipping,
astonishing as have been the achievements in these re-
spects, but in the splendid modernity of the latter nation
in sanitary accomplishments. Of a verity, when we

326

CLIMATE AND DISEASES 327

speak of plague, angels have come upon earth and the
Haran of visitation this time has been in heathen Nippon.
China, of course, has never equaled Bombay in the viru-
lence of the plague, although in the 1894 epidemic, thirty-
five thousand died at Canton alone. Even in the cool
season, Canton has never less than forty deaths a week.
In the neighboring province of Yunnan it is probably
raging in many a damp, mephitic valley when the medical
journals are claiming that at last the earth, so far as
newspaper knowledge goes, is enjoying a respite from the
curse, as seemed to be the case between the years 1844
and 1873. Of late Hong-Kong, which has a native popu-
lation of three hundred thousand, has averaged three
hundred deaths a year, and from January to September,
1906, the Colony suffered nine hundred deaths from
plague. Cases recur among the Europeans of the Colony
every third year. It is remarkable how plague clings to
a house. After a long respite the scourge broke out in
1901 in a beautiful Arcade opposite the Hong-Kong Bank
on Queen's Road, a European being attacked. Do what
the sanitary board will, each year it has returned until
the house has come to be called " The Row of a Hundred
Shudders." Surprisingly the government has permitted
plague corpses to be buried at Cheung Sha Wan on the
slopes of Mount Davis, in immediate touch with the for-
eign life of the Colony. This cemetery of ten thousand
tiny stakes and round mounds, is just above a section of
the noble Victoria Jubilee Road, which sweeps half round
the island, thirty feet above the water, and winds in and
out of a dozen bays through Pokfulum as far as Aber-
deen. Anchored beneath the Chinese cemetery, swings
around her buoy, the white bulk Hygcia (an old war
vessel of Nelson's time), terrible to many a European

328 THE CHINESE

with memories of the fevered struggle with the plague,
the only alleviation for which seems to be copious
drafts of brandy in the intent to stimulate the action
of the heart, which is immediately depressed by the poison
of the plague. The Chinese administer musk, hoangnan
tea and rhubarb, and sometimes lance the bubo. Among
the natives ninety per cent, die, but with the more highly
vitalized, meat-fed foreigners, seventy per cent, recover.
As is to be expected in mixed bloods, one hundred per
cent of the Eurasians attacked, succumb. The first in-
dication is an eruption under the arm pit, or a swelling
in the groin. Almost immediately a great weakness en-
sues, followed by delirium. The only vanquisher of the
bacillus is sunlight. A germ has been known to live two
centuries at Haarlem in Holland, and at last attack the
workmen who opened the tomb of a sailor.

When the plague becomes epidemic the villagers of
Kwangtung, following the principle of the segregation
of the healthy and not the diseased, desert their houses
and make a pitiful pilgrimage to the hills, where they
erect bamboo matsheds. Rats, ants, pigeons, cats and
fleas, all die of the disease, and spread the bacillus among
humans from towels, plates or food, and humans spread
it among themselves from expectoration and contact.
Above all, the disease-soaked earth of the cities, undrained
of filth for thousands of years, breathes out the plague in
the dark, rainy and prostratingly hot May days. In
Hong-Kong, excavation is prohibited from May till Oc-
tober.

During the prevalence of the plague in Amoy in June,
1907, the inhabitants proceeded to Kulang-su Island, and
secured the idol of Shing Hsien Kung, which is named
after a famous doctor now canonized by the Buddhists.

CLIMATE AND DISEASES 329

The Emperor at the last procession ten years ago, gave
the name of "Hsu Chen Jen" (Genuine Fairy Healer)
to the idol. You immediately noticed that the procession
was not a gala one, by the unusual feature of horsemen
being dressed to represent gods. The taotai loaned his
new military liveried band of drums and fifes, which
alternated with the usual strings, tom-toms and horns.
Then, of course, followed the characteristic chairs of
fluttering silk and glistening tinsel ; tables of food for the
gods; bribes for the devils most conspicuous of all; and
noble umbrellas and day lanterns.

The new method of treating plague clothing, long fol-
lowed on the hulk Stanfield in Hong-Kong harbor,
is now practised throughout Japan, on the suggestion of
Doctor Hayaki of the Kencho Board. A steam generator
and retort with trays are rolled into a house. Steam is
forced at great pressure through the clothing and bedding
for half an hour. The method is simple, effective and
non-destructive, for the natives have few leather posses-
sions to be injured. The loss of clothing and bedding
two or three times a year by the former methods came
to be a confiscation as much feared as the epidemic itself.
Japanese crews, ever insistent that they have rights over
other eastern races, have always been rebellious to per-
mitting their effects to be steamed. I have seen them
charge the Chinese crew of the Stanfield with knives,
even under the turbanned brows of British law in Hong-
Kong.

The health of these sub-tropical, coastal cities is some-
what ameliorated by the most violent typhonic rain-storms
which sink much of the fetid malarial matter or chang-
chi far into the ground.

White ants work as insidiously as the causes of earth-

330 THE CHINESE

quakes, and as suddenly, when the timbers are perforated,
bring the floors tumbling to the earth. In Canton, more
care is now being taken to seal the beams and rafters with
tin. Ceilings are perforated, often in beautiful designs,
as the ants are less destructive where air is admitted be-
tween the floors and the ceilings. The pest arrives on
the wings of the night like a cloud, and storms your win-
dow if the light is burning. The wings are immediately
molted and they crawl away on their mission of de-
struction. At the season of flight, we would set a light
in a tub of water and darken the remainder of the house.
The pests would stream to this ignis fatuus, and in this
way thousands were lured to a moat of destruction, as
the flame clipped their wings. The bite of these insects
is another feature of their unpopularity, though not
equaled by the fright that they reach you on wings and
explore your neck and arms as reptiles.

Even within the pale of civilization at Hong-Kong, a
pedestrian on Bowen, Barker or Plantation Roads need
not be surprised to encounter a five-foot cobra or a green
viper, and on the lonelier roads to Taitam and Stanley,
twelve-foot pythons make their slimy way up the bank
from the ferny undergrowth. The natives on the Kow-
loon side fear most the six-inch Teet Sien She, which
drops on their wide Hupeh hats with a thud from the
tiled eaves of the stone houses.

The white man for the tropics is the wiry, lanky, in-
dividual. He is already too thin for anaemia. He should
look like a veteran of amoebic dysentery campaigns, but
be innocent of the experience. He certainly can not grow
apoplectic. His complexion should incline to the swarthy,
as those best resist the actinic rays of the sun. Squalls
of the nerves, and typhonic centers of melancholia, he

CLIMATE AND DISEASES 331

will weather, and ride out on an even keel in his third
year. Thereafter, the three rocks he must chart are:
the yellow girl, typanic airs on a number-man's " screw "
(salary), and the reiterated "peg." But perhaps it is
plainer to say that it takes a genius to withstand the
tropics and sub-tropics, and he must be born. The band
\vho rove the East find their discoveries as melancholy
to-day as did the followers of Camoens' hero, Da Gama,
to whom : " a grave was the first and awful sight of
every shore." Certainly three-quarters of those who ad-
venture float out on the tide again as dead culls. Many
a good fellow's ignorance has stranded him in the melan-
choly little cemetery at the foot of the White Cloud Hills
at Canton; in the old Portuguese cemetery outside the
West Gate of Peking; in the yellow-walled cemetery on
the Wong Nei Chong (Happy Valley) Road at Hong-
Kong, in casteless comraderie with the blue ghosts of Par-
sees; behind the fort-like walls of that square graveyard
of the missionaries that crowns the height over the Areia
Preta beach at Macao, — or in a similar banishment of his
white man's soul in the suburbs of many another treaty
port. Unquestionably those who retire come away with
weakened eyes, liver, spleen, or blood, but these disabili-
ties are merely physical; they have gained in heart, in a
broader comprehension of all human kind, " Cingalee,
Chinee, and Portugee "; caste, half-caste, and outcast. It
should be understood, however, that he does not reach all
these conclusions while he is in the turmoil and the chas-
tening sweat, but from the better perspective of his ancient
and native heath, which he a thousand times despaired of
ever reaching. As a Chinese sage says, " Appreciations
come by contrast, and experiences are the ladder of
Truth." I never knew a foreigner in the southern Chi-

332 THE CHINESE

nese ports who did not languish for nine months of his
first two years in sickness. Saigon and Bangkok have
even a less enviable name than Shanghai, Nanking and
Hong-Kong. Hong-Kong, with miseries enough of its
own, is not, however, productive of the pulmonary
troubles that are prevalent farther north at Peking,
Ningpo, and even Shanghai, where great changes fall
suddenly.

The physicians of Hong-Kong are associated into part-
nerships and have splendid suites of offices in the large
buildings on the Praya front. A large part of their
lucrative practice consists in answering messages from
foreigners taken ill inland in China, directing them to the
proper remedies in their medicine chests to relieve the
symptoms which they have telegraphed. There is prob-
ably nothing as unique as this in medical practice any-
where else in the world.

It is proposed to segregate the ten thousand slowly
rotting lepers of Canton into lazarettoes in the canal-
moated territory round about. In the province there are
twenty thousand more untended wretches, and in the
whole country three hundred thousand. The disease is
most prevalent in the damp, hot South, and especially in
the silk villages. It does not seem to increase with the
population; there have always seemed to be about the
same number in the land. Subscriptions are asked for
the segregation camps, one cash (one-twelfth of a cent)
a day being deemed sufficient to keep one person. As it
is now, they come into unpleasant proximity to their fel-
lows. I once took a powerful launch and passed through
some of the canals south of Canton in the Heungshan
district between the Pearl and West Rivers. The water
teems with boat life and duck farms. Wending among

CLIMATE AND DISEASES 333

it all were the lepers, with distorted hands sculling their
boats against the tide. A gong was displayed, but it was
too difficult to strike it. Some trusted to their appear-
ance to have alms tossed to them. Others held up a cup
which was tied to the end of a bamboo. Silently up and
down they went, beating out the short, fateful strokes
against the hour of death. Those who had no hands or
feet to row, laid on the deck, using their eyes or their
lungs, but otherwise appearing as castaway, dismembered
bodies of breathing humanity, pitiable and revolting to
look upon.

A charitable Chinawoman, — a Hakka of the boat
class, with unbound feet and wearing a flapping veil
on her hat, is seen coming along the tow-path by the
canal. A leper has placed his jug in the middle of the
path. He has no hands or feet, and rolls and crawls back
from the path. The woman approaches, and drops in the
alms. The mortal eyes, with supra-mortal gleam because
of the spiritual accession which comes of suffering, flash
out a thanks and a blessing and an assurance of pity, that
he will not roll back to the cup until she is safely passed.
When she is gone, he works toward the food, and grasps
it in his teeth, feeding like the animal that mortal misery
can make of any of us. Where charity is spread thinner
in the rural districts of Kwangtung, the lepers have the
privilege of accosting funerals for alms, and if they are
not paid they jump in the graves until they receive food.
The disease is now ascertained to be microbic and is a
heritage from times in China which were even dirtier
than the present, although popularly it is still said to be a
poison communicated by sun-dried unsalted fish.

Along the sea-coast of southern China, in all the large
English and French settlements, hot as the climate is,

334 THE CHINESE

every foreign house must be equipped with a drying
room. Here are stowed master's violin and lady's fischu,
and in fact once every week all wearing apparel must have
its day in the hot room. Shoes collect so much fungus
overnight that there is no telling what mysterious growth
they would be the center of, were time allowed. Here,
therefore, is a people, the political writers moralize, who
must keep on the march when they take to leather, and
that it will be woe to us when they do. The home-made
veneered furniture of the colonizing American who is
on his way to Manila, peels like an orange, and a week
afterward his glued boxes tumble apart to the touch of
unseen hands. When discouraged, go to the Chinese
cabinet-maker and watch him make his joints with mor-
tise and screw.

There are no papered walls in the rooms of the palatial
residences of foreign exiles in Hong-Kong or on Shameen
Island, Canton. Walls are either painted or kalsomined,
and the streams of moisture soon make them sorry
enough. The effect would be unbearably gloomy were
it not that bright native tapestries are resorted to, to hide
the oppressive evidence of. the melancholy, clammy
climate.

Following the American boycott of 1904 the Chinese
newspapers trained themselves for something really ad-
mirable in the boycott of Indian opium. In whatever
manner Chinese life is relieved of the blight, every lover
of humanity will welcome the abolition of the abhorrent
trade, if it has the sincere accompaniment of the up-
rooting of the far too extensive Yunnan and Szechuen
poppy fields. The Chinese poets have come to lament
of it as the " White Dragon of the treaty ports " : " Kwo
Wu Ti Ya Picn," " Oh, the murderous opium." The

Eunuchs of the late Empress Dowager in the garden arcade,

Palace. Peking.

Late Empress Dowager Tse Hsi, carried in her chair by eunuch
bearers in Peking's forbidden Palace Grounds.

The lake in Royal Palace grounds, Peking, China. The
revetment wall is built of marble. The pagoda is of
porcelain. Patachu hills in distance.

long

CLIMATE AND DISEASES 335

drug1 has only been in general abuse for seventy years,
and it was England which popularized it by force and
persistent proffer of it. H. E. Chum, once viceroy of
Canton, who is exceedingly unpopular with the Europeans
of Hong-Kong because of his tactless patriotism, is espe-
cially active in the anti-opium movement. The following
is quoted from one of his circulars to officials, published
at Canton in April, 1906 : " The habit is perhaps ex-
cusable in the old and decrepit, but any other officials
found to make a habit of opium smoking will be imme-
diately cashiered, as it is a danger to the nation and de-
moralizing to the individual. The opium eater is one of
the dead who is not yet buried." A greater than Chum,
the veteran Viceroy Chang Chih Tung, in a passionate
appeal, calls the drug : " a worse curse than flood or
beasts; destroyer of mind; consumer of substance; trans-
former into demons and depraved ; the only salvation is a
Renaissance of learning." The use of morphia is in-
creasing, and for this England's ally, Japan, is to blame.
She is flooding China with cheap hypodermic syringes,
but American influence will probably encourage China
shortly to prohibit the importation of syringes and mor-
phia.

To become disgusted with the mad indulgence, look into
the dens along the Leng Thau at Amoy, and at Toulon,
Cherbourg and Brest ; into the wardrooms of the French
warships, or into the smoking-rooms of the steamboats
running to Canton and Macao from Hong-Kong, like
the Tai-on, the Fatshan, the Heungshan, etc. Couches
are provided; the little tin can is feverously opened e'er
the steamer casts off. The native, nervous with the \ing
or fiery longing upon him, searches for a prod which looks
like a hair-pin ; he twirls it around in the can and draws

336 THE CHINESE

out a moist bead which is heated and rolled, cooled and
rolled and heated again. At last its consistency suits.
He places the gummy bead on the large flute-like pipe, or
yen slang (smoking pistol). There is a ravenous, full-
mouthed inhalation as the peanut-oil lamp heats the ball
into vapor ; a mad glare in which brilliant thoughts, like a
Chinese Coleridge's perhaps, sweep through the mind.
He does not really see you at the window, though he is
looking at you now. You are only one of a numerous
fairy company which is hovering there, so do not be sensi-
tive or excuse yourself. Then ensues a sinking dream,
followed by a wild awakening and craving for a further
pipe, which he prepares with sickening impatience. Our
own trans-Pacific steamships all have a hidden opium
room for Asiatic patrons, or woe betide the revenue of
that ship. When a man gets the habit (and about one-
fortieth of the population use opium) it takes about three
years to use the victim up. In his last days, see how the
baggy skin hangs on his bones. How black he is ! Such
caverns of eyes and how they run with water! Such
chills come over him even in the flame of the zenith sun !
Such a thirst he has, but not for water! He knows not
for what he longs; he only remembers that when he
smokes he longs no more. The stupefied effect is pro-
duced by the alkaloids being inhaled into the lungs. The
drug costs the poor Chinese $122,000,000 a year, — more
than their greatest burden, the land tax, — and a sum
which if spent for a navy would soon make them omni-
potent. It makes among the poor nearly all their crimi-
nals, just as whisky does among us. If the religious fear
of not having children to worship at their graves and tab-
let did not operate, more than the one in forty would fall
to the vice. The priests repeat the warning : " Chin yen

CLIMATE AND DISEASES 337

pu ncng yang san tai." "If you eat opium your sons
will die out in the second generation."

Formerly the opium was all imported, but now in faith-
less Yunnan, which diverts all her rivers into French
China, and in the most fertile upland plain of China,
Ching Too in Szechuen, in the irrigated valleys wrhich the
engineers Li Ping, father and son, laid out in 250 B. C.,
the glorious rice terraces are being obliterated and the
cursed poppy is blooming everywhere. All except the
white blooms are weeded out, the white variety being
most prolific in opiate juice. So the most populous and
happiest province, to which the gods gave five parallel
rivers to drag the harvest boats down to the Father of
Waters, the Yangtze, becomes the first to be inveigled into
the folds of that destructive monster whose pestiferous
haunts have heretofore been confined to the seven hundred
thousand acres in the upper Ganges Valley. The scene in
Szechuen is interesting enough ; the land is plowed deep
by a wooden share, which is hauled by anything that can
pull: water-buffalo, woman, pony or camel; the plots
between the raised mud paths are flooded from well or
stream ; the precious seed is mixed with earth before it is
scattered, a most ingenious method to prevent thick sow-
ing and wind waste. In fourteen weeks the heads are
cut off and punctured with needles six times successively,
and some of the powdered pods are mixed with the juice
in preparing the thickened article which is shaped and
hardened in molds about the size of a crab apple. These
balls are again sun dried and shelf cured.

When opium is banished then will revive indeed
in China the golden age of Yau and Shun of which Con-
fucius sang. On June I5th. 1906, the British govern-
ment intimated to the Wai Wupu that they would agree

338 THE CHINESE

at a sacrifice to Bengal of twenty-four millions a year,
to prohibit the exportation of India morphia to China,
provided China ceases to manufacture her own opium
or to import from any other country whatsoever. This
will cost China a revenue of four million dollars a year
duties on the three thousand tons of imported India
opium. China lays no special tax on the Yunnan and
Szechuen poppy fields, but she taxes the thirty thousand
tons of crude opium produced therefrom. John Morley's
speech in answer to the prayers of the years rang with
the revived Christian statesmanship of Wilberforce : "I
am prepared to go all the length of abolishing the opium
trade in China at any sacrifice to England or India."
The government of the Colony of Hong-Kong is sup-
ported to the extent of one third by the tax on the
" Opium Farm," which is owned by the Chinese and
Parsees. There is accordingly a great to-do in the Col-
ony over the alarming prospect of increased taxation of
property, when opiated China sobers up. Surprise is fre-
quently expressed by travelers at the scenes enacted at
the Canton Steamboat wharf at Hong-Kong in the name
of British law and dignity. Chinese gentlemen are
pounced upon by the minions of the local opium farmer
and searched. There is far more blackmail than excise
in the scheme. These detectives of all colors and records,
the " beachcombers " of an occidental civilization tented
on remote oriental sands for a season, abuse their au-
thority flagrantly when they conclude that every China-
man, poor or rich, is an opium smuggler at heart and
that his baggage and home can be turned upside down
at any hour of the night on the excuse of a suspected
cache. The plan of rewarding informers has led to
nothing short of a widespread system of fostering the

CLIMATE AND DISEASES

latent secret society and clan spite. The farm is on Ice-
House Lane in the center of the Colony, and visitors will
know it by the great loads of mango boxes, gunny-cov-
ered, drawn to its gate by strings of nearly naked coolies.

A humorous instance of smuggling recently occurred
at Bangkok. A coolie wearing an enforced look of faith-
fulness to his master, and bearing an exceedingly thick
gold sign with enormous characters of " Peace and Hon-
esty" exhibited eagerness to go ashore. A gimlet was
procured and his sign explored. It revealed in its re-
cesses many tins of the muddy opium paste, and Mr.
Coolie and his queue were prompt to follow their chagrin
over the taffrail.

Large sums of money are being spent at Canton by
the New China party in spreading the anti-Opium cru-
sade. Millions of pamphlets and caricatures are dis-
tributed. American and Japanese doctors are hired in
the sanitariums of the guilds. Lectures are given where
distorted and stupefied victims are exhibited as object
lessons. Anti-opium Societies are being formed in the
villages. The members wear a badge and sign a pledge.

One scene will illustrate the repentance which is sweep-
ing over the land. I do not know how it started, but an
iconoclastic penitence was the inspiration of it. Nor do I
know why it did not take its way to the park of a sacred
temple, to invoke religious auspices. The procession
stopped instead at Chang Su Ho's tea-gardens outside
of Shanghai for the Burning of the Pipes and the vow
of abstinence from opium. Every man carried the evi-
dence of his contrition and the vessel of his shame. Nut-
oil lamps of best hammered Nanking brass work; trays
of gorgeous Ningpo lacquering; ivory and ebony smok-
ing pipes of best Cantonese carving; jars of fuel for the

340 THE CHINESE

lamps from Manchuria; cups of the opium treacle from
Macao and Yunnan; the burned crooked toasting pins
with their precious jewel heads, — were all cast on an oil-
soaked pyre, the base of which was made from the
lounges and tables contributed by a converted opium shop
proprietor. One student withdrew his ebony pipe.
There was a sigh and audible prayers begging him to
" be a man." But the doubters had not read the vehe-
ment fire in his eye. He drew a saw from a nail, cut
the costly pipe in two, as though it were cheap white
wood, and cast the demolished cause of his sorrow on the
heap, to the plaudits of the crowd who from even the roof
of the compound-buildings added to this pile of forsaken
idols, gathered together in an old nation's new Hezekiah-
like strength. Some one from the roof threw a great
yellow tile trough upon the mass, and broke glass and
ivory ware with a sickening crackle, but it did not draw
forth any sighs, or anger, or laughter. Men only looked
the sterner, and struck hammers into the head of the
mass. A mandarin on behalf of the approving officials,
a tepao for the people themselves, stepped forth, and
all drew back. A singing girl broke through the uncon-
sciously formed circle, and asked to be allowed to addi
her pipe and powder puff. Then there was no more de-
lay. Oil was called for, and poured from kongs until
the stack was soaked, when the flame was touched to
seal a company of the people in a vow to the heavens
that they would chain themselves no more to the leprous
past. A recent regulation is that opium pipes shall be
licensed at one dollar, and amusingly : " the license shall
be hung on the pipe."

Japan does not look with as much concern as does
China on the opium habit. Last March, thirty thousand

CLIMATE AND DISEASES 341

new licenses at thirty sen each, " good for life " were is-
sued by the Japanese to the conquered Formosans.

The historic destruction in May, 1839, of $11,000,000
worth of Indian opium by the Chinese at Canton has never
had a parallel for voluntary and really philanthropic sac-
rifice of property, for China ultimately paid triple the
price in war and indemnity. Two hundred chests at a
time were emptied into -a trench which was rilled with a
mixture of lime and salt water until the twenty thousand
ruined chests were drained into the embrowned creeks
of the Chukiang at low tide. The memories of the
so-called " perfidious Commissioner " Lin Tseh Su and
his Emperor Tau Kwang, whose emotions on this sub-
ject at least were on the most exalted plane, both merit
monumental praise. The two memorable letters of Lin's
to Queen Victoria, pleading with her to put an end to
the execrable opium trade, just before the war broke
out, and before China had been taught to grow the poppy,
assume almost the voice of an angel in history, plead-
ing with tears for justice, if one looks at it from the
Chinese side.

The Opium Conference of the nations called by Amer-
ica in Shanghai in 1909 was a failure owing to Hong-
Kong's and India's fear of loss of revenue, but Britain
must yet fulfil Mr. Morley's promises. We shall have
other conferences and America will call them until Britain
keeps her word. The effect of the opium abstinence is
going to add potentially to China's already vast popula-
tion by the decrease in the death rate.

From Formosa to Tonquin the Chinese coast is fog-
bound during February and March. The warm north-
flowing Japan current, chafing the chilled current of the
Yellow Sea which flows south, foments a heavy mist

342 THE CHINESE

curtain which makes the harbors, especially the narrow
Lyee-moon entrance to Hong-Kong, impenetrable for
days. The coast-line with its many peaks of three thou-
sand feet altitude, is blanketed. There is nothing to do
but anchor when iron-bound islands stud the channels.
Often the peaks alone are clear and those who dwell upon
them for coolness behold glorious effects of a sun-lit fog
rolling off and again folding up the spires and towers
of a great city from whence still come the distant cries
of life. Suddenly a gale rushes down the gullies, and
licks up the curtain. In an instant is revealed an active
metropolis, colored with the dyes and quaint with the
forms of the Orient. Or again the peaks only are hid,
and the bearers, as they climb the hills, gradually take
you in your mountain chair deeper and deeper into a chill-
ing heaven of milk-white fog, in which the coolies stumble
and with difficulty pick out the cement path that leads
to chez vous, or better chez moi.

None is quicker to concede the dangers of his own
summer climate than the Oriental himself, inured though
he is to it by heredity and habitude. David said : " I will
lift up mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my
help " ; the Arab goatherd to-day drives his flock from
the plain of Er Rahah to the cooler clefts on Sinai's Peak.
The Pekingese officials flee to the heights of Patachu;
the Seoul man betakes himself to the Namhan Hills. The
Tokio resident retires to Chusenji's mountain lake and
splendid heights. The Ningpo people climb Foting Hill
on Phutho Island. The Hong-Kongite takes a tram
which lifts him in seven minutes fifteen hundred feet
above his boiling harbor and he is borne in chairs three
hundred feet higher to find a cooling breath brought by
the monsoon over the peaks. Or on a still night he slips

CLIMATE ANP DISEASES 343

down the tram; takes a launch and tears around the
mountain-encircled bay to create a breeze by motion, but
the bow cuts only into molten waves of hot, though mag-
nificent phosphoresence.

It is July; the official heat in the shade is 92, the hu-
midity 90. There has been no rain in six months. How
they suffer in number five district of Hong-Kong, where
is packed the densest population of the world, one thou-
sand to the acre, against the nine hundred of New York's
East Side, and seven hundred of London's Whitechapel !
The pigs crawl to the gutter and become molten grease
from their own and the sun's heat. The water of the bay
shines as metallic as a pan, and radiates the heat like
molten steel. The once gray and green war-ships have
been painted white again to de-focus the blazing rays.
To go to the waters for relief in daytime never occurs to
the minds of those experienced in the Orient. There is a
mica-like glitter in the blinding atmosphere; it is the sun
flashing from the suspended sand and dust particles.
Dogs are going mad, for the springs have all dried up,
and there is barely enough drinking water for humans.
The soldiers in the barracks of this garrison post which is
the strongest in the far East lie all day on their backs and
cry to the punkah coolies to fan away their curses. The
sailors, baking between the steel walls of the war-ships,
are ordered to dive overboard on the shady side of the
ship after four o'clock. Ale is struck from the rations
because heat and alcohol are driving men as mad as a
sailor becalmed in the Red Sea. The foreign sick, toss-
ing upon the hot canvas of their cots, bemoan how fright-
fully far away home is. There is not a breath stirring
the Australian eucalyptus trees which have been planted
to drive away the malaria breeding Anopheles mosquitoes.

344 THE CHINESE

They may talk of a thermometer on a flat roof in Bag-
dad registering 150 in the sun, but please remember that
the Tigris Valley has nothing like the humidity which ac-
companies heat at Hong-Kong, and it is humidity only
which kills, and which tells you of its heartless intent
while it is doing the killing. The barometer is scanned
at the newpaper offices to see if there is any chance of a
typhoon breaking the awful still glow. It is painful to
hear a 'rickisha move along at mid-day ; what fool can be
daring a sunstroke ! Every one keeps changes of clothes
at the office, for the journey to business in a jolting sedan
chair has brought out the perspiration which has wet
one's Chifu silk coat through and through. Relays are
hired for your punkah-coolie force, who are on night
work. You keep your shoes near your bed to throw at
a delinquent, who, as soon as he thinks you are asleep,
stops pulling the rope of the ceiling-fan, and falls asleep
himself, utterly indifferent to the fact that the lack of a
breeze will at once wake you up. It is stifling under your
mosquito curtain and you tear it down, trusting to the
punkah breeze to alarm the flying cockroaches and other
winged pests. You raise the temperature of your bath,
for your diminishing vitality will not stand the slightly
cooled water from the cistern of your home, or the arte-
sian water of the club. Day by day the pavements and
walls grow more dazzling in the sun ; night by night your
head swims and you think you will swoon away for ever.
If only you could, and the torture of recoveries not be re-
peated. You grow terrorized, and the sight of the blue
walls of a Christian's cemetery in exile gives you a
panic. You are fearing that after all you will not be
able to pull through. They are sending the patients who
have been operated upon, from the hospitals on the peak

CLIMATE AND DISEASES 345

by ships to Wei-Hai-Wei and Chifu, as their wounds
will not heal here in the south. The barometer lowers and
you have high hopes, but still no rain comes. Two days
later, a ship arrives, minus a yard and a boat or two ; ex-
asperating! the blow swung just clear of the Colony.

You hate the full moon, it only seems like another
glaring sun in the stifling, sleepless night. Some of the
trees impatient with nature herself are shedding their
leaves in a land where there never is frost. The king
of blooms, the purple lotus in the public gardens, has
closed and gone to golden seed. It marks the height
of the tropic season. The reservoirs have lost their
purple sheen and are down to the yellow liquid of the
muddy bottom, and weeds are beginning to grow down
the sides of the basins as a sign of the subjugation of
hygiene. The stores have run short, and you send your
foki out in a sampan to the steamers in the harbor for
" Schweppe and Scotch." Religion comes to the gates
of nature. The missionaries are praying in the chapels;
the bonzes are beating cymbals and dog-skin kettledrums
as soon as the day begins; the sampan women are light-
ing extra handfuls of punk sticks, and even you, an ir-
religious seven year man, on your second term, are think-
ing of your mother, and joining the rest in prayer to
her God for rain. Again the barometer is sought; it is
falling. Men gather round it at the club and the harbor
office. The bulletin of rain is announced in the Chinese
sheet and credit is given to the dragon for old Faith's
sake, though the proof-reader smiles now. But where
is that first wind that is to come from a corner some-
where, anywhere, and open the gates of Salvation?

The wind at last rises with the voice of an angel, and
the harbor in welcoming joy has leaped up with white

346 THE CHINESE

arms. It is growing darker even at four o'clock, and
the burned hills are not so glaringly red and white.
There are shadows spotting them. Coolies come out of
their cellar retreats and are gathering at the curbs, a high-
ya upon their voices and a new soul in their eyes. The
fowl on the disease heaps are crowing, and the caged
Tientsin larks are singing. How the world to-day wor-
ships Heaven in whatever language you pronounce the
word, and shows its faith before the gift! Some one de-
clares they have seen a drop on the pavement, and a num-
ber have dropped their bamboo poles and are stooping
over to make examination. Hoi Loi is shouted: Mah
tells Kih that he did it with his wet finger and the homely
humor explodes the always cheerful native crowd. Of a
sudden a darkness, like later evening, closes in. The
drops strike like shots on the wide grass Hupeh hats of
the coolies and on the starched blue Nankeen blinds of
the sedan chairs. It pelts ; it comes in spears and sheets ;
the earth drinks and rises in a glorious perfume. Goats,
fowl, pigs, dogs and water-buffaloes break bounds and
join master and servant in the street. There is no bond
or free, driven or driver, Yellow or White, animal or its
superior, for a spell. All stand forth equal in need and
gratitude. The curse is ended and there is respite from
the sentence of death by the shafts of the sun. How it
rains ! The gulleys and gorges roar in the night. Thirty
inches fall in twenty-four hours. The great white Praya
has been converted into a lake, which, as it drains into the
sea, makes of the long revetment walls a waterfall of
wonderful width. The mounted army officers dash
through the flood and remind one another : " How like it
is to Calcutta's maidan in August" The unpaved coun-
try roads become a viscid pudding and your house coolies

\
CLIMATE AND DISEASES 347

at last have a good excuse for delaying the supplies for
your dinner.

It is one of the world's wonders to go out into a tropic
storm and hear nature take up her clarion in the weed-
grown gulleys, and see her hands drive the white tor-
rents over the precipices. It is not the effect of Niagara,
which has always been the same; it is the alarm of the
unfamiliar, for here you stood yesterday and now you
know it not in its mad, new grandeur. Your precious
bamboo Venetian blind, that shaded you for so many
months with all the faithfulness of the prophet's gourd,
has gone like a thing possessed of the hilarious storm
soul, fluttering your poster-pictures from its yellow sail.
What of it; it is a sign of manumission. The last week
of April, 1908, was unprecedented for rainfall in southern
China. Fifty inches fell, making seventy inches for the
year, which is twice what. Shanghai and ten times what
Peking gets. Canton and its villages were under two
feet of water. The creeks flowing into the Sikiang
(West River) rose with their parent and submerged rice
fields, trees and huts. Millions die yearly of famine be-
cause China persists in a devotion to rice. The riverine
fields necessarily are in danger of continual inunda-
tion by the flooding of her great rivers whose head-
waters are not gradually released by restraining for-
ests. If China would only take to raising grain on
higher land!

In August last, Peking, which in winter has as low a
thermometer as Albany, reported 105 degrees of heat,
and a cholera scourge, with three hundred deaths daily,
added to the horrors of a summer residence in the capi-
tal. It is impossible under present hygienic ignorance,
to restrain the natives from eating green fruit even

348 THE CHINESE

during cholera epidemics. When the deadly cramps
strike them the native expresses himself by saying : " A
rat is eating me."

Hong-Kong is the emporium for Manila in cattle and
fresh produce, and the United States Marine Hospital
inspectors are stationed at the former place with all
power to vise exportations. I recall an official excursion
with one of the doctors during the prevalence of a chol-
era epidemic in Manila, to find the impossible: a potato
field in the Canton delta which was innocent of the abom-
inable method of using human fertilizer. To prevent the
carriage of cholera germs these officials will not vise dur-
ing certain seasons the exportation to America of the
sacred narcissus roots, which are wrapped in Chinese
earth. We rest secure at home because our government
sleeps not abroad.

A foreigner wonders why his underclothing, which is
beaten on stones in streams, should afflict him with spots
which burn agonizingly. He soon discovers that the
clothes were dried on grass patches which have been
used for years for the same purpose, and that he
is poisoned with dobie itch. Small white pimples form
under the skin wherever there is chafing, and the tor-
tured griffin is transformed into a humorous jumping-
jack for the amusement of the veterans of great and little
ills.

In the early days of oriental colonies the now familiar
dengue fever (then called the Sand) was looked upon
as a rapidly approaching stroke of death, as immediate
insensibility attacked the limbs, and early writings are
full of the amusing fears of travelers. The symptoms
are similar to the plague, excepting that there are no
eruptions under the arms. There is immediate lassitude,

CLIMATE AKD DISEASES 349

bone-grinding aches, and a delirium of pleasant visions
such as opiates produce. The most marked feature is
the itch, which attacks the whole body at once during
convalescence. The sufferer is soused in hot baths;
salves are applied, but do what his nurses may, the victim
must stand three days of the most violent itching that
imagination can comprehend.

The climate has produced a certain moral effect upon
the Chinese of the south. In Europe, heat has made the
southern races hot-tempered and tender under trial. In
China the heat and humidity have taught the race that if
they are to live at all, they must take things calmly, and
thus in conquering their bodies so as to endure the cli-
mate, they have unconsciously disciplined their minds,
as perhaps no other race has, for greatness in a world mis-
sion of the future. Their coolness of temperament is
reinforced by the philosophies of the schools. The race
further steadies itself under discipline, as witness the
native regiment raised by the British at Wei-Hai-Wei, and
Yuan Shi K'ai's troops, — and with this threefold pa-
tience, promises to become a ponderous machine when
drilled to methods, whether of modern commerce or war-
fare. Their equipoise of temperament is possibly best il-
lustrated by an absolute absence of taste for alcoholic
stimulant.

It is peculiar that a tubercular diathesis, absent in
China, should be the strongest inclination of the race
when they emigrate.

An oriental scourge, not so widely written of in these
days because it is attacking foreigners less than it used
to when ships made slower voyages, is beri-beri, the
germs of which are taken from moldy rice, like the
Rangoon product, which carries the excrementitious in-

350 THE CHINESE

fective matter of a small brown weevil. The damp cli-
mate of the south fosters sporadic outbreaks at Canton.
Those who live on the ground floor are particularly sub-
ject to it. The Portuguese of Macao therefore make of
their street floor merely a shed for the 'rickisha and rake.
The beautiful stairway leads from the middle of the
adobe tiling to the second floor, where the family lives,
the choicest situation in the home thus being1 given up
to the necessities of hygiene. The disease only becomes
epidemic where vegetables are lacking in the food and
where the people are crowded together without exercise,
as on shipboard or in camps. As in plague, light keeps
down the beri-beri germs. Instead of a swelling of the
gland, it exhibits itself by a swelling of the ankle. The
mortality is over ninety per cent. The Osaka hospitals
had many cases break out among the rice-fed troops who
were invalided home from the great war in 1905.

Distant from the town of Victoria four miles through
the hills, or ten miles around the island of Hong-Kong,
is the deserted settlement of Stanley which first created
the name : " The White Man's Grave." The only thing
there now which shows the attention of man is the gov-
ernment fence around the graves of the soldiers who fell
a prey to the malaria in the forties, when drainage and
tropical digging were not understood as they are at pres-
ent. The mortality was eighty per cent. Even now the
admissions to hospital on account of malaria are one-third
of the troops on the sick list. The worst feature of the
fever is its predisposition to other diseases. Governments
may well fear malaria as it costs seven hundred dollars to
invalid a soldier home. It is cheaper to keep him well on
foreign station, which explains the recent growth of recre-
ation grounds and clubs without canteens, and the increase

CLIMATE AND DISEASES 351

also in the amount and variety of his work before and
after sundown. Mimic war makes for stern health and
leaves less time for whisky and worry.

A Chinese emigrant will lift his hat before his mouth
to protect his inhalation if you mention the lethal valleys
of the Red River in Tonquin or the mephitic Salween
in western Yunnan, which the superstitious will cross
only in the night. This of course is the worst thing they
could do, as the sun exercises some effect in checking
the malarious vapors.

Cockroaches are a noisy pest which rummage the
whole night. They eat the enamel off your shoes. Every
blue covered book on the shelves is attacked. You can
not keep them out, for they come in on the wings of
the darkness and escape with the wings of the morning.
They dash in your face as you turn up the lights, and
they dive into your friend's cocktail glass between the
time of salute and swallow. When you pursue them
they back up under your chiffonier and eye you with
a squint. In other words this pest of China is a winged,
a wiser, a more traveled and a larger bird than our crawl-
ing specimen in occidental cellars.

It is considered brotherly among the natives to use the
same basin of water when handing to the guests after a
meal a hot wet cloth to wipe the face. This unfortunate
etiquette is sowing much of the trachoma which afflicts
the race. However the Chinese do not use one water
for a family bath as do the Japanese, and suffer from
less trachoma and skin diseases. Faces, pitted by small-
pox, which they call " Heavenly Flowers," are constantly
met. In Hong-Kong the natives offer no resistance to
vaccination.

A great deal has been written that the race does not

352 THE CHINESE

pursue heavy physical exercises and participates only in
light outdoor games. But it is not to be judged there-
from that the Chinese ignore the importance of physical
culture ; they differ from us in that their care of the body
is by a lighter rule suited to their climate, and their more
exhausting day's work. The leading classic of the na-
tion, the fount of all its morals, On Filial Piety, lays
down the following as the basic principle of conduct:
" The first thing which filial duty requires of us is that
we carefully preserve from all injury and in a perfect
state, the bodies which we have received from our par-
ents."

Who that has taken his first ride behind the hill-
climbing chair coolies of Hong-Kong has not marveled
at these splendid specimens of muscular strength? They
are with one exception a sculptor's Greek-like model in
the thin ankles and knees; great calves and thighs and
fair chest and neck muscles. The arms however are
rather thin. A rhythm to the quick step is beaten with
one arm extended, or the " goose-arm " as the German
sailors call it.

A race which believes in the infusion of a young buck's
horns, ginseng and cockroaches' wings for a fever anti-
dote may be expected to follow other unusual medical
methods. With no modern knowledge of dissection or
the osseous system, a Chinese doctor jabs needles six
inches long all over the body and will never hit a bone or
an artery. It is said they practise upon wax figures. In
a wonderfully responsive way they compel the patient to
rouse his courage and exhilarate his nerves. They are
decided dietists and bring about therefore many results
similar to our own. Broths are made of bay, honey, car-
bon, blood, wine and almonds; aperients and hot water

CLIMATE AND DISEASES 353

flushing are called into service. They attach great im-
portance to the appearance of the tongue. Violent ice
douches, exhausting exercise and sudden smotherings are
resorted to. The severest kind of pinching osteopathy is
used efficaciously for dyspepsia and some cases of mas-
sage are so heroic that the athletic physician kneads his
groaning victim with his knees as well as hands. They
do not study the nervous- system, or harden the outer edge
of the hand, as do the Japanese, who in ju-jitsu make one
blow on a nerve center paralyze a man.

Their diagnosticians believe in microbes, but consider
that they are larger than microscopic, and so treat for
eggs and worms. In stomach troubles, neuralgia, rheu-
matism and boils, they are quick to effect a cure. An
infusion of crickets' wings is used to reduce obesity.
They attach the greatest importance in their diagnosis
to the beats of the arteries and claim that there are
twelve movements of significance. There are no apothe-
caries, the physician himself compounding his prescrip-
tions, and the patient, if able, is encouraged to come to
the doctor's residence to take his medicine. Their of-
fices are fitted up artistically, the physician claiming that
the new and agreeable surroundings have a beneficial in-
fluence. A pair of deer's horns (not a mortar and pestle)
mark the doors, and crockery jars take the place of our
bottles. Butcher shops often add one shelf of medicines
to the stock. No physician uses his own 'rickisha; he
hires one, and it is customary for the patient's family to
pay the coolies on departure. When the fee is finally re-
ceived, it is wrapped in tissue paper and is called
" golden thanks." Withal, zeal is added unto prayer
and prescription, for no physician is paid in full if his
patient succumbs.

354 THE CHINESE

Ginseng (ivy wort) is dried over charcoal in Korea.
It is cultivated under screens in a valley sixty miles from
Seoul. Korea makes six hundred thousand dollars a year
from its sale, and America might increase her trade to
millions in the really useless root to which the Chinese pin
their greatest hopes in sickness. The imports of the root
at Hong-Kong in 1908 had dropped to seven hundred
and sixty-six piculs, as compared with eleven hundred and
ten piculs in 1900. A sweet-tasting, dark-colored, clean
and unbroken wild root is preferred. Korean roots bring
the largest price, sometimes as high as twenty-five hun-
dred dollars Mexican a picul. While an infusion of the
root is general, some of it is preserved in honey. The
black-barred, adobe-tiled cellars on Des Voeux Road
West, Hong-Kong, where the herb is dealt in, are unpre-
tentious enough places, but the canny dealers there know
the pulse of trade and in a moment can judge the valuable
roots, picking out faults of weevil, moisture, imperfect
roots, the paler cultivated plants, or roots which have
been redried. Long as the voyage across the Pacific is,
the importers in Hong-Kong will receive the goods only
on consignment.

Another skin disease, communicated by the unspotted
Culex mosquito, is our familiar " Barbadoes' leg," where
the bitten part swells up hard, sore and feverous, and
makes the terrified sufferer think his last day has come,
for he is sure he has been bitten in his sleep by a hea-
thenish salamander.

Flights of greenish gray locusts are an occasional visi-
tation. They settle on the shrubs with weight enough to
break their branches. In three or four hours they will
leave a dozen acres as bare of green as though a forest
fire had singed the landscape, and then like all plagues

Ladies of Manchu society. Peking, North China.

The old examination park of 12,000 brick stalls at Canton, South

China. No lectures were given; the University

consisted of an Examining Board.

Delicate carving and tile-work, shrine of Temple of Choo Shing,
Canton, South China.

CLIMATE AND DISEASES 355

which have accomplished their malign purpose, they are
off with the wings of the morning.

But the never-to-be-forgotten thing, when on the sub-
ject of the Chinese climate, is her typhoons (Fung Kau)
of August and September. Ninety miles an hour veloc-
ity has been recorded. I stayed a day and a night at
Hong-Kong fifteen hundred feet above the water, during
one of these blows. The crescendo shrieks of the wind
were terrifying. A crash was heard : it was the brick end
of the Mount Austin barracks, four hundred feet above us
in the clouds, being blown in. A wralk afterward
through the town on the lower terraces revealed a desola-
tion of windows and shutters, eucalyptus and banyan
trees, like Detaille's painting of The Defense of Cham-
pigny. A barricade wooden shutter, with a thick ty-
phoon brace, is fitted on these tropical houses, for no
glass would stand for a moment. On another occasion I
had been out on the auxiliary Japanese cruiser Nippon
Maru for a trial trip, which was completed in haste at
Aberdeen under a rapidly lowering barometer. With
full speed, in a lightened ship, riding frightfully high,
we returned to the northern anchorage under the shelter
of High West Peak at Hong-Kong. The blow had
come; it was too dangerous for two days to take a tug
boat ashore, even if one were available. Great war-ships
steamed against their chains and plowed like Leviathan.
White-crested billows vied with the gale in a mad race
westward. Behind the breakwater at Causeway Bay,
and at Shau-Ki-Wan and Shelter Bays, a forest of junks
were hid under the Wong Nei Chong Hills. Now and
then, several would be torn out into the path of the
storm, like so much seaweed.

Just previous to a typhoon, it is a wonderful spectacle

356 THE CHINESE

to see the excited crews and women of the junks, — a
dozen on each two-piece fir sweep, sculling to help the
steam launches as they pull strings of boats to safety be-
hind some peak. As the storms are circular, a refuge that
is safe one night may be the exposed position next morn-
ing, and therefore there is much loss of life among the
harassed junk people. A typhoon covers a space of one
hundred miles in diameter. There is a calm of ten miles
in the center, and when passengers on a Pacific liner are
congratulating themselves that they have passed almost
through death, they can not understand the worried look
of the navigating officers, who know that shortly they
must run through the other rim of the storm. When
things seem the worst because of the perfect deluge of
rain and darkness, it is an unfailing indication of a rising
barometer and the end of trouble. Fortunately the ty-
phoons give about three hours local warning, as they
sweep along the coast northward from the tropics, in a
barometer dropping as low as twenty-eight and one-half,
a " typhoon-bank," or over bright west at sunset, with a
cloudy eastern horizon accompanying, and huge unbroken
billows which cast their white wreaths on the shores of a
foamless sea. We were warned in the harbor by black
baskets (globe, oblong, or cone shaped to indicate direc-
tion) being hoisted to the peak on the commodore's East
Indian war relic, the hulk Tamar. The flag-ship
hoisted a red burgee over a white ensign as a signal to
steam against anchor chains at three quarter speed.
Manila and Hong-Kong are more in touch regarding
typhoons than trade, and the former city sends almost
daily warnings by cable. I recall the United States bat-
tleship Oregon, after a fiercer struggle than she experi-
enced in the battle of Santiago, limping through a ty-

CLIMATE AND DISEASES 357

phoon into Yokohama harbor in the fall of 1903, with
her steel deck plates sprung, and boats gone by the board.

The historic typhoons of China are those of July 2ist,
1841; July, 1862; September 22nd, 1874, and September
2Oth, 1906; and of India that which swept over Calcutta
in October, 1864, which last drowned forty thousand peo-
ple. In the 1874 typhoon the saddest destruction was
wreaked along the noble ^Praya Grande at beautiful Ma-
cao. That the unique ruin of San Paulo's fagade was
saved is attributed by the pious Macaenses only to prayer,
as the ruin dominates the city on an exposed hill. The
Chinese are zealous custodians of records, and it is quite
easy to secure photographs of the great destruction. Up
the Canton and West Rivers the storm swept, bombard-
ing everything into ruin and drowning fifty thousand of
the boat people in a tidal bore ten feet higher than spring
tides. Steamers of eight thousand tons and sailing ships
of six thousand tons were hurled up on the stone prayas.

The typhoon of 1906 which destroyed ten thousand
people came without telegraphic warning over the south-
west peaks of Hong-Kong. The local warning of a
vivid sunset the night before was disregarded. Harbor
work and shipping were going on as usual in the early
morning. The blow began at nine A. M. right on the
echo of the observatory gun and was over at eleven A. M.
The screams of the wind rose above the cries of death,
save now and then in agonizing lulls when death alone
spoke. It was impossible to see a yard ahead. The
rain came in torrents undermining everything and hurl-
ing the rocks down the mountain gulleys as from a Roman
catapult. The wind caught up Chinese hats like disci,
together with native sign-boards with their wild flash
of gilt characters, — palm trees, tiles, shutters, masts and

358 THE CHINESE

bamboo sun screens. From the steel walls of the mighty
war-ships which bucked the storm, could be seen a long
procession of two thousand junks, sampans and even
steamers, gale-driven eastward toward Lyee-moon Pass,
and in the lifts of the rain-sheets their crews were be-
held bowing to tablets and throwing joss prayer boats
overboard, while their wild faces were torn with terror.
It was possible to help only a few of the thousands, for
death would not tarry or be interfered with. No theater
of Lethe as melancholy has ever been witnessed from the
decks of war-ships and merchantmen, whose captains
had all they could do to save their own craft. When
the rain-veil parted a moment the whole mountain side
was seen to be leaping white with cascades. At noon a
calm came and in the places where it found them, every
Chinese survivor stood up so uncomplainingly that all the
world save themselves was thrilled. Such is the stuff the
Hakka boat people are made of. Almost the entire
Hong-Kong fishing fleet, which was outside when the
disaster came, was lost, and the little Joss-house at Aber-
deen (their headquarters) started in to burn for ever
memorial sticks in the sacred ash pots before the shrines.
There are fewer boats now tied to the prayas, and for
a long while those who had never begged before, were
forced to cry against their Hakka pride cumshaw
and Chow-chow (help and food). The work of
cleaning the harbor was horrible. In the hot waters,
the bodies immediately fell to pieces or were attacked
by crabs. The Chinese abhor touching the drowned.
They say a typhoon is " devil pidgin," and if they touch
the devil's victims he and they will turn upon the in-
trusive mortal. An hour after the typhoon H. M. famous
cruiser, the Terrible^ whose guns saved Ladysmith and

CLIMATE AND DISEASES 359

turned the tide of the South African war, came in from
the east through the Lyee-moon Pass, and a P. and O.
mailer arrived through the west passage, both reporting
no knowledge of the storm.

Blake Pier, a structure of iron and concrete, boasted
of a matshed over its upper end, where every foreigner
in the Colony stood at least once a day. The storm
struck it with a flip of 'the wing and it was powdered
to dust. Oddly the Sikh's sentry box was unnoticed
by the destroyer and defiantly stood. The matshed over
Queen's Pier came down like the clap of hands. Over
on the Kowloon side, a mile across the bay to the main-
land of China (but British territory) hundreds of sam-
pans had crept timorously under the bridge into the Po-
lice Basin. Here they were battered to chips as the
storm like Hercules leaped into the herd. Scores of
bodies floated under the kindling wood. In the heaving
of the subsiding waters, heads would look up through
the shifting debris and seem to be merely playing hide-
and-seek with death. One end of the matshed of the
Kowloon wharf became a toboggan into the water. That
noblest terrace of ferns in all the world, in front of the
Chartered Bank of Australia on Queen's Road Central,
was littered with the roots and limbs of banyans which
had fallen from the heights above. Under the uprooted
boughs you beheld white-uniformed Jackies at the un-
handy shore work of hacking out a path. A Spanish
steamer lifted her prow from the deep bay, and started
overland for the Cosmopolitan Dock. The British
cruiser Phoenix reared and backed up on the beach of
the Victoria Recreation Club, where the famous water
polo games are held between the navy and the Portu-
guese, for treaty-port China boasts of the world's great-

360 THE CHINESE

est swimmers. The boats of the Phoenix on the
port side had been washed away and from the davits in-
stead was dangling the cage-like cabin of a sampan, the
human occupants having been shaken out, as they them-
selves used to shake rats out of a wicker trap. In one
hour more damage was done, and far greater loss of life
occurred than Togo effected at Tsushima and Round Is-
land. The smallest, prettiest and bravest of them all,
the white destroyer Fronde stood out into the gale with
that brilliant recklessness of the French. There was lit-
tle room on her curving decks to take a stand and fight.
It was uneven; the storm paused and grimly laughed as
the brave little French vessel was swept past the green
bows of the towering British ships. Then, pitiless, he
came on again. Seven white helmeted sailors, with a
song in their hearts : " La Rhone et Chine; mes pays; mes
amours, adieu" were swept into the obliterating turmoil.
The Japanese mail steamer, Sado Maru, came down
the coast on the hem of the tempest. In the heav-
ing seas the Japanese captain stopped his ship twenty
times to rescue eighty junk people, many of whom were
too crazed by exposure to be willing to be saved. The
new tramway on Hong-Kong Island was commandeered
for the gruesome service of rushing rude coffins down
to Ah King's yacht slipway, which had been made into
an emergency morgue. The whole city, stunned as it
was, now rose to the greater fear of a pestilence in a
tropic land, where the safety of the survivors depends
on the dead being entombed on the day they die. Fire
could not be applied to rain-soaked heaps of wreckage
and garbage. The danger must be met; lime was shov-
eled over them for the time being. There was need of
speed, for some said five thousand, and others said ten

CLIMATE AND DISEASES 361

thousand had been drowned. Certainly three thousand
were found along the prayas, shore and harbor. The vet-
eran emigrant steamer, Charterhouse, which, on her
last charter had been plying between Hong-Kong and
Singapore for fifteen years, raced southward before the
storm without avail. She was caught by midnight and
turned over like a kettle. Seventy were drowned. The
Scotch engineer and twenty-five Chinese crew were
picked up three days afterward on a raft which was
washed bare of food and water. They endured the
agony of seeing the ship's empty life-boats drift just be-
yond their reach. On the following days, silent junks,
like great catafalques of the dead, came drifting back
into the harbor, manned by an unseen crew, and spread-
ing terror among others besides the superstitious Chinese.
The lower revetment walls of the two European ceme-
teries fell, spilling graves of the white man's dead into
the Wanchai Road, and over the upper walls the Bowen
hill tumbled, burying other graves.

The good Anglican Bishop, J. C. Hoare, who was
washed in the typhoon from his sail-boat, the Pioneer,
between Lantao Island and Macao, was a familiar
figure to us at Hong-Kong Peak. His efforts in
enforced leisure hours to make life mentally tolerable
for foreigners by giving lectures, as well as his oratory
without notes in the Cathedral, will be held in grateful
memory by a long line of English and American exiles in
China. His body went down under the cliff where the
great pioneer missionary Morrison was buried, and many
hope that a landmark to their honor will be erected by
those who, whether for religion's or civilization's sake,
have come to find bonds about them holding their interest
to China.

362 THE CHINESE

Thousands of these gyrating storms fortunately die
out in the place of their birth, as their progressive speed
in the tropics is seldom higher than ten miles an hour.
When they meet the funnel of the trade-winds they are
given accelerated progress and direction, and reach the
higher latitudes with tremendous impetus. The recog-
nized experts on the laws of typhoons are the French
Jesuits of Manila, Sicawei, Hong-Kong and Macao, the
most famous name probably being that of Faura's, the
Padre, of the Manila Observatory.

In a country where the light is so bright, sight is
prized as Nature's highest gift. When the American
boycott was at its height, it was only necessary for the
bonzes and taotais to cause the statement to spread
among the superstitious masses that kerosene was bad
for the eyes, in order to bring about a return from the
American product to nut-oil illumination. In the re-
ligious riots, the fury of the ignorant is most easily
aroused by circulating the rumor that the medical skill
of the missionaries comes from their compounding in
their medicines the eyes of Chinese slave children.

The natives of the South show a diathesis to enlarge-
ment of the spleen, on account of the long, hot and
moist weather. Foreigners in the treaty ports are
heavily fined if they kick or strike a Chinese about the
body, as death caused by rupture of the spleen fre-
quently results. The native roustabouts are well aware
of this tendency, and duels take place, where the spleen
is jabbed with the forefinger only. Training for these
murderous contests consists in stabbing bags of rice with
the fingers, which grow stiff as iron.

IX

CHINESE RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION

I asked my cook-coolie why he kept a pet hen caged.
He replied that he was feeding it for sacrifice day. But
would not a dead hen do? "Master, I no wanchee a
hundred year dam." The teaching of Confucius has per-
colated even to the laboring masses that conscience is the
ever-present representative of Tien (the Diety). The
purgatorial figure is Buddhistic; the lively sense of
morals among the people is creditable mainly to Kung
Fut Tsze. When we think of China we must not think
of a land which is solely superstitious, but one which is
largely and interestingly religious.

A pretty superstition at Hong-Kong is the purchase
by the Hakka fisher class of red effigy prayer boats.
The workmanship is delightfully neat. Loaded with
prayer papers, and wafted on their way with scented joss
sticks, they are set adrift with a great clamor of devil-
chasing fire-crackers, as the sun breaks over the Lyee-
moon Hills. The high sterned junks will turn their un-
wieldy course rather than wilfully run down one of these
prayer boats.

A Chinese dearly loves a motto written in black on
red paper. If it is the name of his god, or literary an-
cestor, he hangs it over the family shrine; if it is a
maxim of virtue from strenuous Mencius, he places it
over his business counter or couch. The larger the let-

363

364 THE CHINESE

taring and the bolder the individuality in the sweep
of the brush, the greater the art.

Among the rice tillers, if sickness strikes a family, it
is concluded that the devil must be hailed and decoyed.
The Taoist priests come in, and bang cymbals to draw
the evil spirit's attentions; then a dog is killed and its
blood is caught in cups. Lifting these up, the priests
lead the procession to the hills. The sacrifice is set
down, and while the evil spirit is supposed to be busy
gorging itself, the procession, with a worldly wisdom
learned from thieves, scatters to foil the pursuer, the
pfiest returning by a roundabout path to the home, where
he labels the door with red slips exorcising the evil one.
If, on the other hand, the home of the mulberry grower
on the hills is attacked by misfortune, the procession
wends its way to the riverside, where decoy boats are set
adrift. In strange quarters the evil spirit is supposed to
be more easily got rid of. In Korea, two regal red
chairs are borne along, the devil being supposed to choose
for his attentions the one which has, in place of a passen-
ger, many tempting sweets and pork.

The purpose of the prevailing upcurling cornices and
eaves is, of course, that evil spirits, which crawl like
snakes on alighting, may be diverted up into the air,
and not down to the door where human beings enter.
Because of the habit of foxes prowling near the habita-
tions of men, it is believed among Buddhists that souls
which decide to return to the earth prefer this animal
for an abode. If one who is always striving to follow
the best morals, constantly falls into evil fortune, the de-
pressing fatalism is repeated : " the gods are punishing
me for evils done in a former life, when my opportuni-
ties for good were larger and my riches greater." This

RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION 365

belief is constantly brought out as the one morbid touch
in their lyrics.

The farthest inland and the most populous province is
Szechuen, — the land of waterfalls and mountains, —
which has seldom been ravaged by war since the re-
peopling, after the Ming dynasty was uprooted. Here
Thibetan lamasery influence is now strong. " Lama su
poh sing" (We belong -to the Lamas). But when the
railway which the French are building into Szechuen
is completed, Canton and Confucianism will rob Lhassa
of its power here and the cairns which the crawling pil-
grims have raised will go to ballast the path of the
great leveler and civilizer. The passes out of Szechuen
to Thibet are sixteen thousand feet high and can never
be profitably graded. So that far, pounding their long
muh-yu boards, may the last trains of superstition come
with their yaks, to see the tide of progress roll beneath
their scorn; the faithful kissing the tail of the Lama's
pony to obtain magnetic holiness, and the shamans in
maroon canonicals and golden underskirts, muttering ten
thousand times: " Om Mani Padmi Hitm" (Oh! Jewel
in the Lotus). You will notice in a spirit of irrelevant
western humor that this saintliness does not at all re-
press the pony's propensity to communicate magnetic
virtue by a quick drive of the back heels.

Let us look for a moment at a temple of the Lamas.
Into the plaza around it, turjin poles are stuck, and all
the way up the poles little flags, called Lung Ta, flutter,
wafting to Buddha by his holy wind the names of the
dead, for whose early bliss prayer is thus made. The
statue over the entrance is flanked by two brass cups, one
containing rice, the other oil. On the altar, stand seven
cups brim full of water. The flashingly dressed priests

366 THE CHINESE

carry about drum, sprinkling horn, bell or book. In the
dangerous religious gloom, you are very likely to
stumble across bones, whether of buffaloes or humans
it is hard to say. The stench would be awful were it
not for the smoking incense sticks. They are of two
colors, six inches long, the Shi Shang being black and
the Mong Shang yellow. Most of them come from
my old home in Kwangtung Province, and are made of
sandalwood, laka, aniseed, musk, orange peel, ginger,
rhubarb, camphor, myrrh, cassia, cloves and putchuck
powdered and gummed together. Great as is the alti-
tude of eleven thousand feet, buckwheat, rye, wheat and
oats are cultivated, and chickens, goats, and marmots are
seen about the dizzy villages.

There might never have been a Dalai Lama, and no
abstract dreaming of the Ultimate and Timeless had
there been no Himalayas and Snowy and Patroi Ranges
(Sacred Mountains as the zealots call them) to cage
in this secluded worship, which is really the Saints' or
High Church of Buddhism. Reciprocally, so much does
Catholicism admire Buddha that he has been canonized
at Rome. Where we canonize saints, the Chinese en-
noble their ancestors, long dead, when the fruits of their
works are apparent. The old Tsung Li Yamen of
Peking got the Lamas to accord canonization to two
generations back of Robert Hart, our Saxon founder of
the brilliant Imperial Customs Service! The similarity
of Buddhism and Catholicism, in masses, nunneries,
statues, vows, music, exorcism, relics, bells, prostration,
incense, and the use of dead Sanscrit as the Catholics
use Latin, is worth remembering. There is much re-
ligious interchange between Thibet and Shansi Province
in the north, the Lamas from the former often visiting

RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION 367

the Tai Shan shrines which attract the Ordo and Mongol
tribes from sacred Urga. Shansi is even permitted to
exhibit a Lama, who is declared to be a partial incar-
nation, or Gegan, of Buddha. The road from Ching
Too to Lhassa, one thousand five hundred miles of peak
climbing, must for ever remain, therefore, intellectually
the most unlighted road of the earth. Like all moun-
taineers, the Thibetan 'carries his drink badly, and
tumbles down into Szechuen to disgust the remainder
of his race, who abhor even the slightest use of samschn.
He is the most amiable of the Chinese. Withal, how
akin we are ; the Lama, paddling his boat along the Kin-
sha River on his way to the dying, rings a bell, so that
the faithful may kowtow and pray for his mission; and
the Catholic cure, riding between the firs along the rough
roads of the Laurentian foot-hills of Quebec on a similar
errand, rings a bell to request a bow and a Mere de Dieit.
It was among the Buddhists, and in a convent at that,
that the Boxer movement germinated, which is evening
up for a Christian convert launching the Taeping re-
bellion.

The members of the Chinese Civil Service throughout
asseverate that the Ih Ho Chuan ("United Retaliating
Arm," which we have translated into the famous word
" Boxers " ) troubles were precipitated by the action of
the Jesuit missionaries in shielding Chinese political
prisoners under the cloak of their being proselytes; to
be frank, using their converts as " Agents Provoca-
teurs." They also affirm that the outbreaks of 1906,
such as that which occurred at Nan Chang where an
unfortunate mandarin committed suicide, were caused
by the ambitious policy of Catholic missionaries who
used government chops on religious documents in order

368 THE CHINESE

to impress converts with the independent attitude which
the Catholic Church could assume toward the heathen
Chinese government. In fact, the Catholic Church,
known in China as the Tien Chu Chiao, is charged with
an ill-concealed ambition to establish an imperium in
imperio, but if the fault is the Church's, it is the more
the impudence of France's political policy in China. Her
presumption of protecting all Catholics in China should
be exploded, as was proposed by the Pope in 1898. She
is only using the Catholic Church as a political tool.
The separation will be better for both parties. The
same use of government seals had much to do with the
bitterness which led to the famous massacre in 1861 at
the French convent in Tientsin. In June, 1906, the
central government issued a gazette to viceroys and
governors, calling attention to the paragraph in the new
treaties that missionaries are not to be permitted to in-
terfere in litigation in which converts are involved. The
various Chinese ambassadors declare that if this clause
is honored conscientiously by the Catholic missionaries,
we shall see the end for all times, of anti-foreign and
anti-Christian rioting. This point has been again and
again brought out by Sir Liang Cheng Tung, himself
a Yalensian, in his speeches, and it should be treated by
our press with emphasis.

. Another vexatious source of altercation has been the
insistence by the Catholic missionaries on building their
chapels and schools in Gothic architecture on dominating
sites, so that the towers shall rise above the surrounding
native buildings, which are always low, as is illustrated by
the twin steeples of the Pei Tang Cathedral at Peking,
and the two white granite spires in Canton's New City.
This offends the deepest Taoist superstition of the race,

RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION 369

Fungshui, — that nature worship of high places in hilly
country, prominent peninsulas at the seaside, and bends in
rivers. It would be wise for the church immediately to
abandon the conflict with this innocent and really poetic
belief. The Protestant missionaries declare that the con-
stant friction of the Jesuits with the political affairs of
China, and their continual demands that the central and
provincial governments shall call Catholic missionaries
mandarins, are jeopardizing not only all missions, but the
safety of life and the future influence of all white men in
China.

On the lonely wooded eastern slopes of Pokfulum, one
thousand feet above the water, on Hong-Kong Island,
facing nine thousand miles wide of lonelier ocean, is the
retreat and headquarters of the daring Catholic propa-
ganda in south China. Above the camphors, banyans,
firs and bananas, amid the dank smells of ferns, tube-
roses and ivy, over the terraced tombs of the Brothers,
look the dormer windows of the beautiful Gothic pile
(formerly Douglas Castle) of refectory, printing house,
chapel, and monastery of the Missiones D'Etrangeres,
white and quiet in an alien scene. When the prostrating
sun declines, the brothers emerge for exercise. Some
wear white topy-helmets, and long coats of alpaca, called
soutanes, and the scene is enlivened for others have
adopted the queue, felt-soled shoes, and the brighter robes
of the natives. The ruling Chinese vastly despise this
condescension, but it is popular with the people them-
selves. In the days of Xavier and Ricci, the Jesuits in
China adopted the yellow robes of Buddhist monks, but on
being jeered upon the counterfeit, they have since worn
the blue and lilac robes of the literati, and in this, and per-
mitting the Chinese to retain ancestor worship, the official

370 THE CHINESE

Chinese believe that Catholicism admits that it has not
come to establish a new religion, but to add culture and a
political system. The Missiones D'Etrangeres is one
of the heaviest stock-holders (holding half a million) in
the lucrative Tanjong Pagar Wharves and Dock of
Singapore.

There is no reason why Protestant missions should
not permit the ancestor tablets to remain in the
home for memory's sake, in the respect that we hang
photographs, but of course the incense stick should be
forbidden. When we speak of Protestant missions and
Christian literature in China, one name ahead of all
comes forward, that of Robert Morrison, the first and
greatest Protestant missionary, who lies buried in that
little square, high-walled cemetery at Macao over the
grand Areia Preta beach. His translation of the Holy
Scriptures in twenty-one volumes, completed in 1823,
remains the foundation stone of Chinese missions.
What a labor that was in surreptitiously chiseling on
blocks of tin in the East India Company's local office
the thousands of characters, the meaning of which he
was almost the first to unlock, and certainly the first so
generously to apply. The Nestorians in A. D., 505, and
again in 780, and the Jesuits Ricci and Ruggiero in
1580, and Schaal under Shun Che's patronage in 1661,
had the same, indeed a better opportunity, but it re-
mained for Morrison to give the Book (the " Way "
they call it) to the Chinese, and leave the truth to the con-
sciences of the people, to be watered by their own cares
and sorrows. He was wisely willing to let meddlers,
not missionaries, in an arrogation of temporal authority,
interfere with Rule or Misrule. To his name scholars
also bow for his compendious dictionary of Chinese.

RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION 371

It is marked that missionaries receive little sympathy
from white men resident in China. In extenuation it is
pointed out that this should not be wholly laid to the lat-
ter's spiritual condition which remains in a suspended
state. The eyes of the alien layman are in the back of
his head, looking longingly toward home. He is not
enthusiastic on even the letters of China, and hardly in
the notable scenery. He is engrossed in a race to
make money rapidly against the speeding ravages of
an enervating climate. The fact remains that missions
must look to America and England for that love which
more than money speeds their feet along, in following
the path through China first trod by the Apostle Thomas.
America should for years send none but medical mis-
sionaries to China. The London Mission hospital at
Peking is an example of what should be copied through-
out the land.

In a corner of Mongolia near Turkestan, at Turpan,
in an excavation, old boots have been found which were
repaired with kid palimpsests of the third century, A. D.,
— a literal example of the truth marching into be-
nighted Cathay. On what other Tartar's long boots,
borrowed from an Osmanli brother, have been sewed
those lost treasures of the West, the palimpsests of
Sappho's poems, and the missing chapters of Livy and
Cicero? Speaking of relics, the enlightened governor
of Shensi headed a procession from an open field outside
Sianfu in the fall of 1907, which bore the sacred Nes-
torian tablet for the first time in eleven and one-half
centuries, under a roof within the Peilin Temple of Si-
anfu. As is well known, the two thousand Chinese and
Syrian characters of this stone record the communion
with the fifth century Christian Church, and the deposit

372 THE CHINESE

in the Sianfu library of part of the translated Bible. The
notable fact is to be recorded here that this year a replica
of the Nestorian tablet was placed in the Metropolitan
Museum of New York City.

Thirty miles southwest from Macao lies the island of
Chang Chuen, where the pioneer missionary Xavier died.
Shortly after leaving Shanghai on the southward voyage
you pass Phu Tho on the starboard, to land where would
be a task requiring Pauline zeal, for the whole island is
given up to a hundred monasteries occupied by thou-
sands of mumbling bonzes. It is to the Chinese what
Phite was to the Egyptians.

The nationalism of China owes everything to Con-
fucianism, with its great teachings of the immortality of
the soul's conscience; Hiao (filial piety) ; Chung (obedi-
ence to virtuous rulers) ; its eternal insistence on Shun
(personal character) ; duties more than faith, and op-
position to caste. Ancestor worship was, of course,
founded by Confucius, and remains the most unique
feature of Chinese customs. Confucianism exempts no
position, taking ground as forward as the Roman Cen-
sor Morum>, Commune or Duma, even to the granite
seat of the throne : " Vice dethrones the divine right in
a ruler." According to a Confucian sermonette : " The
seed of Heaven or hell is all sown in this life," and again,
the Ming Tsien Chi says : " If you practise good works
here you need not worry about your future." These
teachings have made the race the eternal adamant it is
to-day, founded, of course, on tablets of a different color,
but not so much of a different grain from those of Moses ;
stones indeed of strength and ready to hold the super-
structure of whatever new commercial, industrial or re-
ligious civilization may be laid upon them. Like the

RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION 373

Romans of the Republic, the Confucians in temples,
streets and mottoes exalt the fame of the leading virtues,
calling them " Most Excellent Truth " ; " Heavenly
Aid " ; " Beneficent Concord," etc. No weaklings, there-
fore, such a race. What they are now they have always
been, and will always be. We need not fear for their
sincerity in the future. Judge of the morals of a people
whose business men paste on their shop doors mottoes
for the New Year such as : " May I manage my occu-
pation according to truth and loyalty," and " May I
uphold benevolence and rectitude in all my trading."
Over a temple at Canton is the inscription : " Right and
Wrong are blended on earth, but separated in Heaven."
Mottoes and empty spirit seats take the place of Bud-
dhistic statues in Confucian temples.

With the advent of modern learning, especially while
Japan influences her, — beautiful, dreamy, metaphysical
Buddhism of the temples, with its bezoar amulets and its
teaching of faith more than duties, will recede into desue-
tude, and China will adapt for national uses the amended
Confucianism. Confucianism will add to its creed that to
serve the State is to be sure of immortality, on which lat-
ter subject it has previously been as hazy as Buddhism
was replete. Confucianism will become picturesque, or
humorous in its patriotism (dependent on the oriental
or occidental view) and issue bulls deifying its heroes.
But all the sestheticism of the classics that has been cul-
tivated in the past will be neglected for the new militant
Confucianism, which in this respect alone can be com-
pared to the Shintoism of Japan. The superiority over
the more clever Shintoistic Japanese which the Chinese
have enjoyed, in that breadth of character which philos-
ophy produces, is creditable to Confucianism. In col-

374 THE CHINESE

lecting the philosophy and poetry; in codifying the
manners, and in adding to them riches of his own in the
Book of History; The Odes; Spring and Autumn An-
nals, Confucius or Kung (as Mencius unlatinized is
Mang), has been the Homer and Chesterfield of the
Asiatics, and in the Book of Rites he has been their
Moses. As was Plato to Socrates, so was Chu Hi to
Confucius, and the sublime academic groves at Nankang
in Nganwei Province draw the feet of thousands of
religious and literary pilgrims every year. An interest-
ing bit of stoical philosophy of the Confucian school re-
futes the Occidental's argument concerning prayer:

" God answers no individual. He merely has given a
memory to mankind in the aggregate to avenge accumu-
lated wrongs; thus cycle by cycle man achieves his own
advancement with the passive approval of God, who for-
bears ever to interfere after He once created the human
mind." Another Confucian said to me : " You Occi-
dentals worship Eternity in the past, we believe in the
Immortality of an endless human succession." Then I
asked myself if West and East in matters of the spiritual
after all may not be going around one circle to a meeting
point in the one Judgment of all Virtue, which will
weigh these two peoples who come, one from the right
hand and one from the left, by the two rules, those from
the West by conduct, and those from the East by con-
science.

Oddly the religion of Fo or Buddhism, with its cen-
sers, crosiers, holy water, extension of hands in blessing
and manumission of sins, is the religion of a few dare-
devil, camel-riding, dirty Mongols of the northwest prov-
inces. While Confucianism puts the stigma of inferi-
ority on women, Buddhism recognizes her religiously

Characteristic Manchuan sign-poles on the wide main street of
Mukden, the birthplace of the reigning dynasty.

Great bell tower, Temple of Five Genii, Canton, South China.

Christian converts herded in the Apostolic Mission during the battle

of Tientsin between the Boxers and the foreign allies.

The converts were unflinchingly loyal to their teachers

and religion, both Protestant and Catholic,

during the bloody clays of 1900.

RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION 375

and socially. Accordingly Buddhism's strength in China
is in the hearts of the women. It was Buddhism which
brought most of the present art into China, and also
evidences of Greek influence, which we find occasionally
in the architecture of joss houses and the Greek inter-
locking gold border used on tunics. Buddhism endowed
China's literature with imagination, and is the mother
of her short novels. Buddhism has been instrumental in
teaching the masses patience in their poverty, because
in some future life they will receive rewards. One weak-
ness of Buddhism in China has been that her official
language is Sanscrit. Not since the twelfth century
have her theological productions been virile. The poet-
ical mysticism of Buddhism can be judged by its emblem,
the lotus, and the interpretation of its teachers : " It
grows from the slime and expands in glory over the dark,
filthy waters which hold it; so shall we expand in the
blessed Nirvana."

Miracles are believed in; the favorite one recited be-
ing of the righteous lad, \Vu Mang Tsang, whose poor
mother was dying for the lack of sustenance, which he
was unable to purchase and would not steal. In his
despair, he went to the bamboo brake to weep. Al-
though it was winter, pitying Heaven (Tien) made the
tears to bring forth tender shoots of bamboo, which he
brought home and boiled, — a parallel with our Elijah
and the Ravens parable. Their Virgin Mother, whose
statue shows her outstretching many arms of charity, is
called " Tze Pei Kun Yam," merciful hearer of prayers,
and a notable temple is erected to her honor in Canton.
Buddhist temples are generally known by the name of
" Three Chiefs," referring to the three incarnations of
Buddha. Buddhist nunneries are not infrequently met

378 THE CHINESE

kinds of matter have souls, and that a year of our time
is a thousand years of the soul's time, so intensely do
spirits live. It is remarkable that they have a Prome-
theus myth, for Sui Jin is said to have brought fire down
from Tien (Heaven). Their Adam (Pwan Ku) is rep-
resented as coming from Heaven in the form of a giant,
and they believe that for a long while there were giants
on earth (our Titan myth). The Taoist priests are rec-
ognizable by gray and blue robes in distinction to the
saffron and pink robes of the Buddhists. The former,
unlike the latter, are not shaven. Taoism can hardly be
said to have an ethical mission ; it is rather a prostration
in fear before the wonderful and supernatural. It has
done more to depress the courage, alarm the imagination,
and make the race impractical than any other influence
in China.

If, in one comparison, the religion of the East and
Christianity are to be discussed, it may be said that the
former prescribes the duty of class; the latter the duty
of the individual. One Chinese may indulge in the San
Chiao (all three of their religions). They have a say-
ing : " .When all is well and you wish it to stay well, be
an ethical Confucian; when in trouble, seek the super-
natural Taoists; when you die, let the atonement-pro-
curing Buddhists be called in."

In the British alliance with Buddhistic Japan, and
what may almost be called a consequent alliance with
Buddhistic China, Britain strengthened herself immensely
in the affections of Buddhistic India, which has a keen
affiliation with the Buddhists of China. She thus raised
another arm to keep in subjection India's sixty million
Mohammedans, about whose rebel hearts is always folded
closest the green standard of the Prophet, which is ready

RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION 379

to unfurl at the first throb, as seen in Armenia in 1909.
No nation knows better the inner spirit of this sect, which
they call Kei Chiao, than the Chinese, for when the gov-
ernment was busy with the great Taeping rebellion, sud-
denly all Mohammedan Kansu and Shensi arose in the
northwest, and the extirpation of the green fires of the
Prophet's war camps was one of the most vexatious un-
dertakings in recent Chinese history.

In Mongolia, the government has had to use arms
and bribes alternately to keep in check the Mohammedan
Tungani tribes. In Yunnan, the Mohammedan Puntais
called a Ghazi or holy war and no settlement could be
found of the difficulties until every living Mohammedan
was driven into Burtnah. Many have now returned to
Yunnan, where they are engaged mainly in the fur trade.

Standing high above the low buildings of Hang-chow
(the bore city) you will notice the minaret of a mosque
whose preservation through the surging times of the
Taepings in 1863 speaks loud for religious toleration
in China, for this coastal city is the farthest removed
from the centers of Islamism. At the north gate of
Canton stands the Kwang Tah minaret, one thousand
years old, a memorial to the Prophet's uncle, whom Can-
ton claims. The numerous Mohammedan tribes of Mon-
golia have more of a reputation for singing and eating
than for industry. It is an odd sight to see the blue-
capped Chinese muezzins mounting the minarets.

The Great Thanksgiving Day, the ritual climax of
the year, is the Feast of Lanterns, occurring on the fif-
teenth day of the first moon (February), when the Em-
peror on behalf of his people goes up those uncovered
altar steps to worship the Imperial God of Heaven
(Hwang Tien). In times of drought, and visitations

380 THE CHINESE

of typhoons, th£ trials of criminals are hurried, lest
Heaven should have been offended by delayed justice on
earth. The prayer of the Emperor, who is dressed in
blue, because he is worshipping the High God who dwells
above the cerulean, shows some of the sonorous solemnity
of the old Hebrew Prophets : " Oh ! Imperial Heaven,
looking up I consider that Thy heart is benevolence and
love. With trembling and anxiety I would not rashly
assail Thy footstool, but would first consider my errors.
I would inquire if I have swept away one poor man's
field to add to a monarch's park. Have the oppressed
had no appeal? For the gluttony of bribes, has the
blood of the innocent been spilt? Have the gleaners
been pushed into the ditches, by the powerful, to starve?
Have our enemies been left to trample on my flock as
mire and ashes? Oh, lay the plumb line to my sins and
teach me duty. Grant me renovation for the sake of
my myriad innocent." This strenuous self-searching, set
in rugged poetry, is truly Davidian, Cromwellian, or
Rooseveltian, as one's taste may say.

The Chinese are not always patient with their gods,
which cost each inhabitant one dollar and a half Mexican
a year. If drought continues; if the fisheries are poor;
should a bonze become unpopular, — revenge is taken first
upon the idol, gilt and fearsome as he is. " Thou pig of
a spirit; thou art well gilt, incense-smoked, set firm and
high, fed tight as a drum-head, yet thou givest up noth-
ing. Thou wooden thing so impotent that thou canst
not wipe off the webs which the insolent spiders spin
over thine eyes ; thou harborer of filthy rats' nests in thy
bowels, we spew thee;" and forthwith the idol is las-
soed and dethroned. The bonze is then beaten. The
temples are never closed. They crown every prominence.

RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION 381

To the Buddhists alone these poor people give six hun-
dred million dollars a year. Confucianism, which ethic-
ally and religiously has done more for the nation, has
asked for comparatively nothing.

The dragon is not only the emblem of China, he is
a god, the great spirit of mountain and air, the supporter
of the Middle Kingdom of this supposedly flat earth.
His retreats must not be impiously disturbed, says the
Taoist Fungshui geomancy. Our happiness depends
upon his somnolence, and his sleep depends upon our
virtues, especially obedience to tried and honored cus-
toms. In other words, as the Chinese like as few re-
minders as possible from their rulers, they likewise ap-
preciate their gods most when they hear the least from
them.

At Ue Chau, a village on the Rhine of China, — the
Sikiang, — four hours by launch west of Canton, an
Episcopal mission hall has been raised with a name in
conformity with the Chinese taste for the grandiloquent.
It is called " The House of the Illustrious Teaching."
This slight accedance to Chinese customs is a wise move.

At midnight of the first moon, which begins the New
Year, the father leads his whole household to the door.
Lanterns are lifted up, and all bow before Heaven and
toward earth, in solemn worship of nature's God. An-
other beautiful nature ceremony is the pouring of liba-
tions, when favors are asked for the growth of the grain
in the field. At the northern boundary of the farm,
whence enter all evil spirits, is placed a statue of Buddha,
in the same manner that the Romans set up Terminal
statues of deities.

The expressions of mankind the world over, after all,
reveal the similarity of the human heart, when its sor-

382 THE CHINESE

rows drive it to poetry. The proclamation of the pres-
ent Regent employs the following language in reference
to the demise of the late monarch : " He who has now
gone the Great Journey." Would not this equally well
serve as a metaphor for North American Indian, or Cau-
casian ?

By different names, but in a similar worship of patron
saints, China accords with the rest of us. As the sailors
of Brittany and Marseilles pray before the shrine of
" Notre Dame de la Garde," or the raftsmen of Montreal
to " Notre Dame de Bonsecours," the fishermen of China,
most of whom are Buddhists, for dangerous vocations
call for a picturesque faith, — bow to the Venerable
Mother Ma Tsu (i. e., Maya, mother of Buddha) for
succor. The most conspicuous temple outside the walls
of Ningpo is erected to her name, and her worship is
principal in the bonze-ridden island of Phu-Tho, in the
Chusan group. Throughout sea-faring Fu-kien you come
across her shrines. She is the Athena of the Chinese,
At Canton she goes by another name, Kun Yam (God-
dess of Mercy), a temple on a hill, erected in the fif-
teenth century, being dedicated to her. The sightseer
will not soon forget the great flight of stone steps, both
to this heathen temple, and to the Christian ruins of San
Paulo at Macao.

Singularly Mosaic is that part of the worship at the
Altar of Heaven, when the Emperor commands a bul-
lock which is without blemish to be burned whole upon
the porcelain altar as a sacrifice to the God of the Sky.
In the case of the bullock brought to the Altar of the
Earth, the animal is buried, not burned.

Too little attention has been paid to the vicarious
heroism of Chinese morals. A son may offer himself

RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION 383

for imprisonment, to free a father, and it is legal to
punish relatives where an individual is considered to
have placed too great an onus of crime on a community.
The family is responsible for the individual's debts, with
the result that there are few bankruptcies, the family
taking the place of the government in restraining in-
dividual defalcation. Thefts are punished by the family,
and not the magistrate, — • the clansmen whipping the cul-
prit along the highroad. The principle of " Filial
Duty " is not only religious. It is the political and
ethical foundation stone of the nation itself. The man-
darin is instructed to act " as a parent to the people."
China has possessed an easy-going central government,
because it needed little other, so long as it withheld from
dealing with the Occident. The ninety million family
wheels, all of one pattern, going at one speed, to the same
end. and by the same simple impetus, worked in their own
circles without conflict, because they did not overlie.
There are no billionaire wheels in the State, keyed to
a billion-metre speed in conscience and privilege, to up-
set the balance of the other wheels. It was not desired
to produce even great men, much less powerful ones, but
rather uncompetitive happiness and uniformity.

Murderers cut off the hand or foot of their victims,
and place it in the mouth of the despatched. The super-
stition is that this prevents the spirit of the dead from
following the desperadoes through this life. As near
Canton as the defile of Yan Ping, eight of these victims
of Hakka brigands were discovered in April, 1907. It is
very common to hear among one's native friends at Hong-
Kong lament for members of their families who have
been kidnapped and probably taken to the defiles of Yan
Ping, San Ning or Hoi Ping, while emissaries go to and

384 THE CHINESE

fro between the capturers and the relatives of the cap-
tive, discussing terms of ransom.

As near the vortex of commerce as Bowen Road,
which hangs over mountainous Hong-Kong, one may see
native women bowing on the open hill before stones in
their Taoist faith. You will notice a well-worn path
winding up the mount, and a jutting rock which throws
its shadow over the road. The sampan women of the
Hakka tribe believe that the Being, one-third of whom
is resident in prominent stones, has power to affect the
fortune and the motherhood of sons. Part of the wor-
ship consists in sitting on the stone. The stone is some-
times given a name, and letters are painted on it, but
there is no bonze in attendance. While jade is the fash-
ionable jewel and " good-luck " stone, meteorites are
worshipped in Pechili and Manchuria, because they come
from Tien (Heaven). The same idea of veneration
crossed the Aleutians, and is noticeable among the Es-
quimaux. The immense meteorite of pure iron in the
Natural History Museum, New York City, which was
brought to the United States by the explorer Peary, shows
evidences of having been chipped by the Esquimaux for
amulets.

China has its pilgrimage, with a fair adjunct, just
as Mecca and Benares have. In Confucius' country,
the road to Tai Shan Mount, near Tsi Nan, where the
saintly Shun is reputed to have instituted sacrifices to
Heaven, is lined with booths, and those who pass by on
their knees return erect, to buy and sell. The suppliant
who crawls along, begging you in his piety to step on
him, will mark you out and drive the harder bargain
on his return, for your having done so.

Their art portrays only one being comparable to our

RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION 385

winged angels, i. e., Lui Kung, the God of Thunder, who
always appears with wings. We pour ridicule upon the
attempts of the Chinese to express their idea of the
Creator, and we laud our own Greeks for loftiness and
refinement of imagination. Both races are equally in
earnest. The Greek tells you that God is an accumu-
lative Greatness, and he makes you the statue of a man
five times enlarged, as the Zeus of Phidias, which does
not frighten you at all. The Chinese say that God is
inimitably vast; that the vastness bewilders the human
imagination, and he prepares to show you how un-
equipped you for ever are to essay the subject. He con-
ceives for you the gigantic Creator Pwan-Ku, with ab-
normal brain, distorted limbs, terrifying look and awful
gesture; or the leaping war demons, Hung and Hah,
which hurl thunderbolts and whose eyes burst in flame.
It would be hasty to say that the Chinese sculptor is ridi-
culing God; nothing in his theology, ethics or attitude
supports this. He frankly tells you that the omnipres-
ence of God which they express by the word Shang Ti,
and the vastness of God which they express by the word
Tien Chu, can not be expressed in sculpture, and in their
worship can only be recognized fittingly by falling before
the heavens in utter prostration. If anything, the
Chinese ridicules you that you should dare to conceive
what God is. The art of both races is really reverent,
but when it comes to imagination, the Greek is a .tame
multiplier of his man unit. The Chinese sculptor does
not attempt to bring you definiteness or peace of mind;
he brings you the terrific, just as the thunder brings it to
a child, and this is exactly what his art intended.

The existence of Chinese Jews in Kaifong, where the
railway crosses the Yellow River on China's longest

386 THE CHINESE

i

bridge, reveals one of those marvelous strandings of
history which are the despair of research. A lost tribe
they certainly are. They came down from Kansu, just
as the original Chinese did, but how they reached that
province in the first place, none can say. They retained
few rolls of their Scriptures ; some they left in Turkestan
for mending boots. Their synagogue, or Li Pai Tsz,
has vanished, and the sect can only be traced by ferreting
out the few melancholy individuals who will probably
never be united again to unroll the sacred scroll. The
decline of letters, and consequent inability to read and
appreciate their scriptures in the original, caused the dis-
banding, more than did persecution or poverty. What
more concrete argument was there ever offered for the
all-importance of education ? More melancholy from our
point of view was the wiping out of the last of the
Nestorian Christians among the Chinese by the sword
of Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century. Tantay, a
village near Amoy, possesses the ancient ruin of a Mo-
hammedan temple built during the reign of the Mings,
when Mohammedan bands wandered freely about the
empire. The religion of this band has now been lost,
but the Arab features are noticeable among the descend-
ants of a lost tribe of the Prophet's.

JAPAN S COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE TO CHINA

The click of the trigger in the "Thousand Islands"
kingdom has ceased, and the land now hums to the noise
of the spindle. The Arisaka gun-barrel has been
stacked away, well oiled for future use in Manchuria,
Luzon and Australia, and the stocky Japanese is instead
aiming hammer blows at rivet heads. A larger in-
dustrial host than England's is at work, and each man is
half a day longer on his "job." It is unromantic but
inspiring. What is Japan doing, what is she doing it
with, and what will the influence be upon her neighbor
and pupil, China?

Her wharves are few; her harbor facilities as yet
miserable. They will not always be. At Kobe, for ex-
ample, I found the sampan journey ashore from my
steamer a turbulent one. The ship cast anchor in a
wind-swept roadstead, where lightering is on some days
impossible. The godown (warehouse) accommodations
are as much a problem of congested terminals as in
American cities. The government (not the municipal-
ity) is erecting vast breakwaters on the Onohama side.
The project of digging a channel and bringing ships to
wharves is not favored in Japan, except at Kobe. A
ship can be loaded by lighter- junks from both sides while
in the stream. Yokohama is constricted by a break-
water built too far up the bay. The hills have crowded
around Nagasaki's little bay until it is almost smothered.

387

388 THE CHINESE

Fierce tides, like a vengeance for the Russian fleet sunk
near-by, tear at the buoy moorings at Shimonoseki and
Moji. But whatever the hindrances, they are going to
be overcome by vast walls of cement, and the patriotic
government has made higher walls of tariffs, so that the
cement shall all be Japanese, which means wealth to the
cement king Asano, who owns the Toyo Kisen Kaisha
Steamship line which plies to San Francisco. It is Mr.
Asano's plant which is supplying much of the cement for
the new San Francisco.

Osaka is both the city of sculptors, and the Manchester
of Japan. Its citizens declare it is destined to surpass
Hong-Kong and Shanghai as the leading emporium of
the East. The East is for ever hearing the noises of chal-
lenges and attacks in the great wars of the ports. Some
years ago, twelve million dollars were appropriated for
dredging in Osaka Bay, and six thousand ton ships can
now reach the once silt-barred port. The Toyo Kisen
Kaisha will soon have five home-built fourteen thousand
ton ships running. Osaka is now proposing to spend
fifteen million more dollars to bring their like within
lightering distance of her bunds, and the smoke of a
thousand mills tells you why. This is where labor is
cheapest, and it is also the unhealthiest part of Japan.
Japan for sometime has been sending from Osaka a
branch fleet of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha to Bombay for
seven hundred thousand bales of raw cotton a year, as
compared with imports of four hundred thousand from
America, and seventy thousand home grown, used in the
mills. These mills ordered fifteen million dollars' worth
of looms and spindles from the Manchester and Bolton
manufacturers. The Bombay cotton is carried five thou-
sand miles for three dollars and twenty cents a ton, which

JAPAN A COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE 389

shows how cheaply the Japanese can run boats, and pres-
ages, whether we like it or not, their approaching marine
triumph in the China coastal and trans- Pacific trade,
where the white man's unsubsidized ships have to charge
two and one-half times greater freight rates per mile to
pay expenses. The Japanese, by paying low salaries to
navigating officers, run their ships at fifty per cent, less
wages (even though a larg'e part of the white man's crews
on the Pacific are Mongolians), and still pay their stock-
holders never less than twelve per cent. The largest
steamship company, the Nippon Yusen Kaisha, paid fif-
teen per cent, in 1906, and in the panic year of 1908 it de-
clared twelve per cent. The standard freight rate by
American ships on flour in quarter sacks across the Pacific
varies from eight to five dollars; on the Japanese lines,
which are not in the conference, it runs from three dollars
to one dollar a ton, depending on competition. A ton of
coal is carried from Moji to Yokohama, seven hundred
miles, for thirty cents gold, on Japanese ships, whereas we
would lose money in carrying a hundred weight at that
price.

The British have complained; later the Germans
grumbled; and last the ambitious China Merchants' Line
objected, that the Japanese should enter the coast trade
of China. The Japanese reply was that they won the
perpetual right to the Yellow Sea when they destroyed in
the thirteenth century the two armadas of Kublai Khan,
that famous digger of the Grand Canal, whose fleets
sailed from the now silted-up port of Chin Cheu in
Fu-kien. Japan reaches results rapidly in modern days.
She took only ten years to put on the seas the world's
most victorious navy. She boasts that in five years more
she will control the mercantile marine of the Pacific, and

390 THE CHINESE

in ten added years, have purchased and copied enough
machinery to make her industrial production so vast that
it will conquer on both sides of the Pacific. Japanese
commercial flanking movements at sea have recently been
as sudden as those famous appearances of Kuroki on
land. This year they drove the Boston Steamship Com-
pany of America into liquidation. It paid its stock-hold-
ers nothing. There were three ships averaging eight
thousand tons.

For a decade the North German Lloyd have enjoyed
what they first well won, the monopoly of the Bangkok-
Swatow service. Japan clapped alongside of it one
sunrise a competing line, and a running fight was made
over the whole course and back again, until the Lloyds
capitulated in a division of the service and concessions
on another route. The next to be attacked were the
lines long run by the ancient and honorable Scotch
houses of Jardine and Butterfield, on the Yangtze, and
latterly the service of twenty-seven vessels of the North
German Lloyd between Shanghai and Tientsin. In the
thick of the former fight the Japanese used methods
which they declared would not exactly prove to be hara-
kiri ones, of carrying cargo and passengers free between
Shanghai and Han-kau, a distance of six hundred miles.
Winning a position accordingly in the center of China,
they did one commendable thing in instituting a new line,
where even the Germans did not think of going, between
Han-kau and Changsha, through the famous Tung Ting
Lake. Modern steamers, drawing only four feet, ef-
fectively perform the service. For the due upkeep of
this fleet in the Yangtze region, the Yokohama Dock
Company have bought certain tsubo of land at Shanghai
for a branch dock and ship repair yard ; a double invasion

JAPAN A COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE 391

therefore, of even her friend Britain's "sacred Yangtze
rights." It would never do to fatten the shares of the
British-owned local repair yard. Perfide Nippon! the
share-holders of Farnham-Boyd's cry. But why recrim-
inations over so unheroic a matter as business, the cold
Japanese retort. A few years ago the Japanese had not
one vessel stemming the yellow current of the Yangtze.
To-day they have forty steamers on the river, operated
as a branch of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha, capitalized at
six millions, and receiving from the Japanese govern-
ment a subsidy of four hundred thousand dollars gold.
If anything ever leads to the annulment of the Anglo-
Japanese alliance, it will be this act. Not even the Holy
Sea of Europe is sacred from their attack, for 1909 opens
with a Japanese line on the Mediterranean Sea from Port
Said to Trieste.

A word backward. The first Japanese steamship
company, the Yubin Jokisen Kaisha, founded in 1872,
was naturally a small affair. The Cunard of Japanese
shipping arose in 1874 in the person of the great Samu-
rai, Yataro Iwasaki, who founded the more pretentious
Mitsui Bishi Kaisha. In ship-building nothing was done
until the daring subsidy law of 1896 gave birth to the
great shipyards at Kure, Kobe, Yokohama, and the ba-
ronial Mitsui family's dock at Nagasaki, which are now
building fourteen thousand ton merchant ships to join
the vast steam tonnage of 1,200,000 tons, accumulated
mostly in the last ten years, which is a fleet therefore
as imposing as the world's largest line, that of the Ham-
burg American Line. These fourteen thousand ton
passenger ships, which are for the Toyo Kisen Kaisha's
San Francisco run, will burn oil as fuel, thus being
the world's pioneers in this respect. Twenty million

392 THE CHINESE

barrels of California oil have been contracted for, to
be delivered within the next three years. The oil will
be refined in Japan at refineries being erected at Kobe,
Moji and Yokohama. Only twenty per cent, duty will
be levied on crude oil against forty per cent, on refined
oil. The oil will be carried in five subsidized tank
steamers, now being built at Nagasaki. The Toyo Kisen
Kaisha will not carry the oil in its mail steamers as the
heavier traffic on the Pacific is westbound, and the space
is all needed for merchandise. By touching at Van-
couver with these eighteen knot ships, the Japanese ex-
pect to bring the allies at London and Yokohama within
twenty-one days of each other.

This year will see the Nippon Kisen Kaisha in opera-
tion under the presidency of Baron (of course a Baron,
for business is now a matter of privilege, just as war
used to be in the feudal days) Shibusawa, with a tonnage
of two hundred thousand, including lines to Chili for
fertilizers; Bombay for cotton; Java for sugar; Saigon
and Bangkok for rice; Brazil for leather, wool and que-
bracho, and Canada for flour and lumber. Japan will
grant a subsidy only to a line which brings raw ma-
terial. She wants also to enjoy the freight on the manu-
factured material, to be returned in her own bottoms to
the producer of the raw. When the St. Paul road
reaches the Pacific, it will invite over the Osaka Shosen
Kaisha as its trans-Pacific connection.

The plan is eventually to buy out the choicest Ameri-
can ships on the Pacific, and the Anglo-Japanese Bank
has a standing offer to loan twenty millions at five per
cent, for the purpose. This contemplates the purchasing
of the Pacific Mail and Hill fleets of eight eight-year-old
ships, averaging eighteen knots and fourteen thousand

In quaint Mukden, the birthplace of the reigning Manchus. 'Ihe fa-
mous Drum Tower gate, which sounded the alarm when the
Russian and Japanese armies passed each twice down the
wide main street of the northern capital in 1904.
Xote the peculiar shop signs. The boy is carry-
ing hair switches, which are used to
drive flies from his master.

The future battleground of Chinese, Russians and Japanese : the

country near Mukden, Manchuria. Japanese infantry

charging the Russian trenches, 1905.

The Great Wall of China with parallel lines and redoubts climbing

the first range of hills, 2500 feet high, as it leaves the

sea at Shan Hai Kwan, Pechili province.

JAPAN A COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE 393

gross tons. They expect then to have only one remain-
ing battle on the Pacific, but a hard one because the same
weapon will be used, viz. : subsidy against subsidy, — in
the case of the eight steamers of the Canadian Pacific
service.

Until recently the Japanese mail lines to America and
England have employed foreign masters, mates and purs-
ers, partly because white passengers were thus attracted to
their boats, and partly because the foreign insurance
companies demanded it. But as Japan has entered the
insurance field this has all been changed on the Nippon
Yusen Kaisha, the premier line. Captain Yagi now takes
the fine ship Aki-maru, and Captain Kato the Sado-
maru to and from Seattle. The experiment was also
introduced on the London line, when Captain Mie took
out the lyo-maru.

In addition, there is a modern sail tonnage of four
hundred thousand tons which is crowding back to the
fisheries the cumbersome but picturesque, high-sterned
junks. Japan's modern steam and sail, and old style
junk tonnage aggregates 2,500,000 tons.

China has few natural harbors, which are good. They
are generally where a river meets the sea, and her
problems of siltage are similar to that of our Mississippi
at New Orleans. Afforestation at river sources is to be
tried. China has one great coastal steamship line, the
China Merchants', which has in its directorate some of
the Peking official set, and she has spasmodically run a
line financed by Hong-Kong Chinese merchants, from
Hong-Kong to San Francisco and Mexico. Foreign
loans and subsidy are to be tried, in the Japanese fashion,
to foster a national mercantile marine, and particularly
to furnish a reserve for a navy. China has had for years

394 THE CHINESE

tens of thousands of Cantonese sailors serving on foreign
ships. Coastal shipping laws will also be adopted to
drive out the foreign carrier, but Japan will declare war
on China over this venture, if America does not befriend
China.

The trouble with the whole American subsidy question
is that the rich railroads are allowed by government to
drive the American flag off the seas by making contracts
with foreign ocean' carriers. If the freight were in patri-
otism and in appreciation of the valuable government pro-
tection which has made the roads a success, refused to
foreign owned steamship companies, the whole com-
plexion of things would change. The railroads would
own their own trans-oceanic lines and see that they
paid without anything more than a just mail allowance.
Extend the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Com-
mission and among other joys we shall have a transport
service always ready to impress and save the nation in
peril, which was not the case when we fought the Spanish
for the liberty of a neighbor.

The formidability of Japan's labor can be understood
when it is stated that a dock for the Mitsui barons was
recently cut at Nagasaki out of the solid rock large
enough to put on the blocks a twenty-two thousand ton
battleship. The cost per cubic yard for hand-drilling,
blasting and removing was only fifty cents. The highest
wages paid to artisans in the empire are one hundred sen
(fifty cents gold) a day given ship-builders. In textile
industries the maximum rate is fifty sen. Police receive
eighteen yen (nine dollars) a month and sergeants twen-
ty-five \>en a month. Into the world field of labor steps
the Chinese, with figures which beat the Japanese by one-
third, for we got the cost of labor on cargo on American

JAPAN A COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE 395

mail ships at Hong-Kong down to seven cents a ton,
against twenty cents in Japan and forty cents in Amer-
ica.

Japan has conquered the eastern coal markets with
exports of six million tons a year, laying down coals as far
south as Singapore for three dollars and a quarter,
against the cost for English and Australian coals of five
dollars. The famous oily coals all come from Kyushu,
the southern island, and much of the mining is done un-
der the sea, American electric turbines providing the
power. The northern island, Ezo, also produces bitu-
minous, but of a harder quality, known as Muroran.
Japan mined fifteen million tons last year, and produced
eighty million gallons of petroleum. As a gift of the
war, she will now develop the product of the famous En-
tai mines of anthracite in Manchuria, which come in good
stead, for Chinese anthracite coal has been costing ten
dollars a ton at Newchwang on account of the ex-
pense of transport. Machinery, a mining policy on the
part of a progressing government, the abolition by edict
of the Fungshui superstition, and branch railways, will
before long uncover much of China's vast wealth in coal,
and her undeveloped deposits are the richest in the world.
With hampered facilities and disconnected transit she
now mines half what Japan does. We are now begin-
ning to notice Chinese coal offered in competition with
the foreign article at Canton, Han-kau and Tientsin.
The successful cotton and iron mills erected by Viceroy
Chang in the middle provinces burn native coal.

The little empire of Nippon, which is smaller than
Scotland, and supports far more people than the British
Isles, perforce uses many unique footholds. Swamps,
which are too poor to raise rice, are put under toll to pro-

396 THE CHINESE

duce the matting rush. In one prefecture, Okayama,
which faces the Inland Sea, four hundred thousand rolls
a year, worth over a million of dollars, are woven for ex-
port. These old industries, with a lingering sentiment,
are yet retained to the clans, which have immemorially
worked them.

China's largest matting swamps lie off the romantic
West River, near Canton. German middlemen control
the product, which moves in the fall. Only the cheapest
labor and steamship rates make possible the export of the
product, which will probably rise in price, following Ja-
pan's example. The Chinese matting is superior in
strength but inferior in design, as compared with the Jap-
anese matting.

Here is the reverse of the shield. In many instances
it was humorous, yet it was mendacious. I found large
numbers of our copyright labels pirated on Japanese in-
ferior canned and bottled goods, offered throughout Ja-
pan, Korea and Manchuria, despite all international
agreements and conventions. A shameful authority until
recently for national theft was Article Two of the Japa-
nese patent law, by which if the Japanese Patent Bureau
published the description of any foreign invention it be-
came Japanese public property and could not be patented
by the foreign owner. In this way Japan has stolen ten
thousand foreign inventions for the benefit of her people,
and she has given exclusive right to Japanese firms and
individuals to collect royalty on six thousand additional
foreign patents. .When the Israelites left Egypt with
the borrowed valuables of their taskmasters, their thefts
did not at all equal the debts their enslavers owed them,
and therefore the unbecoming spectacle was not an alto-
gether reprehensible embezzlement from the view-point

JAPAN A COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE 397

of equity. The Patent Bureau of Japan has neither Isis
or Moses, and only the frenzied god of Ambition on its
dishonored shrine, and the Samurai must eventually come
forward and do some shop-cleaning for his weaker com-
mercial brother, if Japanese progress is to be permanent
and live in the smile of the nations. Japan can not too
earnestly consider history's eternal lesson that moral
strength is prerequisite to armaments in conquests of her-
self and her enemies.

The editor of the Tokio Nichi introduced a bill in a re-
cent session of the Diet to prevent newspapers copying
telegrams without the consent of the paper which had paid
for the telegram, but the House of Representatives, on
the suggestion of Mr. O. Oka, editor of the Tokio Shinb-
bun, threw out the bill, so that if the Japanese steal pat-
ents from the world, they are also pirates of copyright
and Press Agency right among themselves. It is risky
to lend an ambitious Japanese student your book ; he will
translate it ; he will have it published in his name, leaving
yours off, of course, and immediately his fame as a
scholar is enhanced in the eyes of his ducal patron. If
you expostulate, he asks if he is not the author of the
Japanese version, and offers you a glorious dinner at the
tea-house when he receives an appointment in the Civil
Service as the protege of the said duke, who also has his
reasons for affecting literature. The Japanese apologists
are sufficiently patriotic to be blind to every national criti-
cism, but they are lavish enough in reviling their betters
in the homely virtues, who dwell across the yellow water.
To quote the smart Mabuchi, as far back as the seven-
teenth century : " The Chinese, bad at heart, are good
only on the outside. The Japanese being straightforward
can do without moral teaching ; the Chinese have theoreti-

398 THE CHINESE

cal morals; the Japanese have practical, up-to-date
morals."

Comparison in the case of China is comforting, for
China protects foreign patents.

Japan was winning some wonderful commercial vic-
tories years before she sighted her arms for war. She
was and is selling America twice what she buys from
America, which is probably the most significant achieve-
ment of the island kingdom to date. Every Japanese
propogandist who is trained to write articles for the
American press, purposely ignores this fact. Until 1905
America was Japan's best customer, but now she sells
China more than she does America, which is distinctly in
line with her ambition. Immediately after the war
closed, her imports decreased five million dollars a month,
and her exports increased by the same amount, all be-
cause the soldiers of Oyama went back to the silk and
cotton looms, the porcelain kilns and the matting sheds,
which they had deserted for a while.

As eastbound freight is the lesser, it will not be sur-
prising if timber from the war-won Yalu is freighted in
larger quantities by the Japanese steamers to the Pacific
coast of America. They have formed the Japan-China
Timber Company, and expect to cut three hundred rafts
a year at a profit of six hundred thousand dollars. Al-
ready they are laying down at Guaymas, Mexico, two mil-
lion ties from Manchuria at fifty-six cents gold each.
These virgin forests have never before been desecrated
with saw or ax. The Japanese railways buy their chest-
nut (kuri) ties for twenty-five cents gold each, which
shows the latent resources and the economy of produc-
tion of the wonderful little kingdom. Japan's lum-
ber is produced mainly on volcanic Ezo Island in the

JAPAN A COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE 399

far north. The foot-hills have been enriched with an
ashy and charred deposit over the marshes. On this soil
kashiiva (oak) senn (elm) and ash grow to a sturdy
girth, but not to a great height. The lumber is faulty
and twisty. In the great heat of the summers an under-
growth of bamboo grass, ten feet high, springs up. Win-
ter is severe during three months. The stream courses
are precipitate, and the whole country is cut into canyons
and fissures, which make logging difficult, but the inde-
fatigable workers overcome everything and produce at
the low cost already detailed. Every sprig of wood is
used as carefully as in France or Palestine. The waste
is burned into charcoal, if nothing else. Every living
Japanese, male, female and child, I think, smokes ciga-
rettes, and the cost in forest fires is something deplora-
ble, which the little country can not and will not long
afford. Her forest policy will add a total abstinence ad-
junct. Not only into lumber exporting, but furniture
making, Japan is going, and she has a fashion of lifting
her goods into any country where the tariff wall is not
too high for such little brown men. Pitiable, deforested
China possesses no timber, except in Manchuria, and Ja-
pan will block the export of lumber from that province
to the sea via the South Manchuria Railway until the Chi-
nese, overcoming the vast diplomatic difficulties which
have been raised recently against them, parallel that line
to Newchwang. The rival yellow men are now at
swords' points over this development, and you can put it
down as the cause of two future wars.

Seven years before the Japan-Russia war Japan un-
folded her serious designs upon China by soliciting ten
thousand Chinese students to come to Japan. Thirty
thousand are this day in Japan. Of course no other

400 THE CHINESE

country can now hope to equal Japan's predominant in-
fluence, evidenced for one thing in the overthrow of
China's most ancient institution, her Classical Examina-
tions. It would pay the four white nations chiefly con-
cerned to set apart five million dollars a year to secure
Chinese students for our schools, shops and universities.
No other commercial plan can be so effective, for the stu-
dents are in the fore of the New China already. Particu-
larly should Chinese from the southern provinces be solic-
ited, and not Manchus, for the Manchu is only one-twen-
tieth of the population, and he will in the end only bend
to the opinions of the majority. The Japan-China trade,
largely as a result of this educational policy, has devel-
oped wonderfully in the last few years. In 1903 the im-
ports and exports of the two countries amounted to twelve
million yen only. In 1905 the total had risen to fifty-two
million yen, and this year it was eighty million yen. This
year Japan sent to China for twenty million yen of raw
material, and returned the goods in manufactured form,
charging China forty-five million yen. Until 1897 the
smooth bores glistening from armored sides compelled
Japan to admit the manufactures of the nations at a duty
of not more than five per cent, ad valorem. The China
war showed the nations what Japan could do, and the five
per cent, condition was annulled. The real victory of the
Russian war is a more extended one, in that the nations
now consent that Japan may raise her ad valorem duties
to fifty per cent, unless a quid pro quo is given. Statistics
of the peace years demonstrate two things, that a smaller
number of Occidentals visit Japan than one would sup-
pose, and that Japan is becoming the Mecca for Orientals
in increasing numbers, who, marvelous to say, leave in the
country half as much per capita as does the Occidental.
Here are the figures of tourist arrivals :

JAPAN A COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE 401

ORIENTALS OCCIDENTALS

1902 . . 4.950 8,759

1903 . . 6,418 8,810

1905 .. 9,237 7,293

1906 .. 12,500 8,000

I0j07 . . 20,000 7,OOO

1908 . . 40,000 6,000

Of the Occidentals, Russians predominate, with Ameri-
cans and British following in order.

Cheap labor is Japan's greatest industrial asset.
Japanese industry, in order to overwhelm competition, has
adopted a new slavery, that of long hours for operatives.
Mill hands work from daylight till dark, or thirteen hours,
for forty sen (twenty cents gold) a day. The departure
of tillers from the field to factory and mine has increased
the cost of living seventy per cent, against a wage increase
of forty per cent. The enormous reserve which this
people can discover is illustrated by the work, mainly per-
formed by women during the war. Seventy per cent, of
the war necessities was produced within the empire itself.
When Britain, a similar island manufacturing nation,
fought in Africa, only forty per cent, of the war's necessi-
ties was produced at home. That taxes are not to be
lowered, can be judged from the figure in Prince Ito's
(by the way, a common name in Japan) speech, in which
he said : " No Daruma, with his fairy gold-producing
hammer, is likely to appear in Japan; there is nothing
for it but our own diligence. If others do not drown
who are lower down than we, you may be sure we are
still swimming." How he loves to rap China's " sub-
merged civilization," and how China hates him for it,
just as the Koreans do !

You will be struck by the dangerous width of the cars
which run over the main lines of three feet six inches

402 THE CHINESE

gage. On this account the fastest expresses do not
make over forty miles an hour. The railways carried
one hundred and forty million passengers last year, with
only thirty deaths. The government had to take over
the railways, as only government credit in such a coun-
try could standardize gage through the numberless tun-
nels, culverts, bridges and grades of this difficult coun-
try, where nature has tried to delay the feet of beauty,
and not to speed the car of commerce. As in China, so in
Japan the merchants club together to secure carload rates,
the ratio of this " consolidated " traffic assuming the very
large proportion of eighty-six out of one hundred tons
shipped. Ninety-five per cent, of the passengers travel
third class, and only five-sixteenths of one per cent, travel
first class. The average train load is sixty-three passen-
gers, and length of journey twenty miles. How opposite
is the tale, and the luxurious habits it reveals, in Amer-
ica ! The average freight train load is three hundred and
eight tons, and average haul sixty-one miles. Gross
earnings averaged sixty-two hundred dollars a mile, fifty-
five per cent, of this being applicable to net earnings. The
average monthly compensation for all railway employees
is seven dollars and a half, against forty in America.
Engineers get forty cents a day.

China is entering upon a railway policy under better
auspices, and with less physical obstruction than Japan,
and the result will accordingly be more gratifying in all
directions. Already the Chinese mileage is greater, and
is rapidly increasing.

That commerce in America and Japan is respectively
on a peace and war basis could not be better illustrated
than by the railway policy. Government control of rail-
ways in America so far is only desired in respect of

. . ~ -,

-'; \ 1-^2 7 X*- ~'' f'- - ™" -^^ ^ ^

Iz

I as

*£

a t/3

JAPAN A COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE 403

rates. Japanese control was primarily desired in respect
of operation. It was found that the operation of the Jap-
anese railways during the war was not satisfactory for
the movement of troops, and nothing to compare with the
wonderful work which the Siberian Railway performed
in carrying and feeding nine hundred thousand troops,
five thousand and five hundred miles from their base.
Russia won only one victory, but that was a signal one,
and a monument to America's pupil, Prince Khilkoff, the
maker of the Trans-Siberian Railway. On a single track
line, with rails only forty pounds per yard, twenty trains
at a speed of sixteen miles an hour were passed in the
twenty-four hours. Compare this with the best perform-
ance in India of thirteen trains daily. Japan has not been
slow to admire and follow. The first 125,000,000 yen
have been transferred for the purchase of all roads au-
thorized by both houses of the Diet in March 1906, and
the following roads have already entered government op-
eration : The scenic Sanyo from Kobe to Shimonoseki ;
the Kokkaido; Tanko; Kobu; Nippon; Ganyetsu, and
Nishinari " Tetsudos," or railways. Under the new
Japanese tariff, Germany now supplies the largest amount
of locomotives and Britain the largest amount of cars to
Japan. Considering the money America loaned Japan
during the war, she should be in second instead of third
place. When the contracts were made our navy was at
home.

Weight is computed by the Kin (one and one-third
pounds), and Kivamme (eight and one-fourth pounds) ;
measure by the Go (pint), To (one-half bushel), and
Koku (five bushels) ; and for precious metals the Motnmc
equals our fifty-eight grains troy. Land is surveyed by
the Tan (one thousand and eight hundred square feet),

404 THE CHINESE

and Cho (nine thousand square yards). China was not
behind in an irregular system of weights and measures,
understood differently in the various provinces, until the
Peking Board of Revenue recently advised a decimal sys-
tem, the unit of length, Tchi, being equivalent to thirty-
two centimeters; unit of capacity, To, equivalent to 10.35
liters; the unit of weight, Lian, equivalent to 37.30 grams.
It will take some time before the people are taught the
new system.

The mortgaging of real estate in Japan was only per-
mitted as late as 1906, and brought into the country forty
million foreign dollars each year 'since, which has been
immediately put into mines and manufacturing. The
Japanese government is encouraging the investment of
Lancashire capital on long leases (the same as the Hong-
Kong crown leases) in the cotton-mills of Osaka, just as
Dundee capital went to India and developed the jute fac-
tories. Prior to the passage of the real estate law, manu-
factories paid as high as nine per cent, for their loans.
China is yet behind in the security she gives the foreign
investor. Therefore the viceroys borrow on provincial
account, with taxes as security, and like Chang of Han-
kau erect their own provincial cotton, iron and coal
plants.

As might be expected in so volcanic a country, where
there are fifty-four active and one hundred and ten ex-
tinct volcanoes, sulphur is largely produced in Japan,
generally as in Sicily, in the district of the active vol-
canoes. Fifteen thousand tons a year are exported from
Hakodate. These Ezo mines are owned by the ducal
Mitsui family. Work is interrupted for five months by
snow. Japan was thus happily in a position to produce
her famous Shimoso explosive for the " Great War," as

JAPAN A COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE 405

they call it, and naturally her matches (a government
monopoly) are all-conquering in China and the far
East. They affect the use of a gloomy-colored box pat-
terned after the Swedish. The superior richness of the
Japanese ore can be judged by comparison with the ore
of Sicily, the figures being fifty per cent, against twenty
per cent. The yearly output of sulphur is seventy mil-
lion pounds. Salt and tobacco manufacture are also gov-
ernment monopolies, so that Japanese conservatives are
not eloquent on Trust-smashing. China follows suit in
the respect of making salt a government monopoly, but
she knows her people will not stand for much repetition
of this system.

In Formosa Japan is eagerly developing gold mining
at an increase of about twenty per cent, each year. In
1908 one and one-half millions of bullion were produced
at the Kyufun, Kinkwaseki and Botanko mines. There
are even successful placer workings at this late date. Sul-
phur, coal and petroleum mines are now being developed
near Kilung in Formosa. Since Japan has shorn China
of Formosa, China's old port of Amoy, which once con-
trolled Formosan trade, has fallen into bitter desuetude.
Put it down, too, in these days of awakening national
conscience and restitutions, that China must have For-
mosa back, of course paying Japan the tutor bill.

When the silver above the line of oxidation worked
out in the Kosaka mine in the north of Nippon Island,
copper was discovered, and seven thousand and five hun-
dred tons are produced yearly. The ancient Ashio mine,
in a hill near the sacred temple town of Nikko, turns out
like clock-work, with its eight thousand employees, seven
thousand tons yearly, and the Besshi mine adds another
six thousand tons. So Japan takes pretty good care of

406 THE CHINESE

herself in this other war and electrical requisite. Before
the Great War the steel industry was in a languishing
condition, not twenty thousand tons a year being pro-
duced. The war changed things, the Government put-
ting $12,000,000 into the furnaces at Wakamatsu, near
Inaka Lake, in the north of Nippon. Note that it is the
government initiative in all this progress. The works
there, and new works at Muroran, in Ezo Island, are
turning out one hundred and fifty thousand tons a year,
and in two years the government expects to meet one-
eighth of the requirements of the country, which are
about eight hundred thousand tons a year. At present
Japan is drawing pig-ore from Han-kau, China, where
most of Japan's supply will come from in future.
Speaking generally of copper, silver and gold mines in
Japan proper, the ore is of low grade, but great profits are
made because every member of the family works at the
lowest wages. There is also little expense for pumping,
as the drifts are cut horizontally into the hills. The
finest machinery and complete electric plants minimize the
cost of operation. Last year Japan proper produced
seven thousand and five hundred pounds of gold, and
two hundred thousand pounds of silver. Japanese gal-
leries are protected less carefully than in America, and
the proportion of deaths is therefore heavier. The health
and education of operatives are sacrificed to production,
and Japan has many an uncomfortable sociological prob-
lem on her hands.

Let us take a glance at " Outer Japan," for so we must
learn to call it. She is finding it hard as flint to con-
quer the spirits of the sulky Koreans in their stream-
webbed land of the " Morning Calm," who want neither
to rule themselves in a modern sense, nor to be ruled.

JAPAN A COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE 407

Their emblem, the Tageuk — two comets involved and
for ever impeding each other — is a sign not without sig-
nificance. The Japanese affront their pride on every
occasion. For instance, they have turned over an import-
ant precedent in compelling political prisoners to submit
to their hair being cut off. The Japanese intend that the
Koreans shall remain a subject and dying race and not be
absorbed, the government having prohibited the Japanese
colonists to intermarry with the natives. Japanese states-
men are emphatic that Lincoln made a mistake in giving
the negroes equality with the whites. This unmistakably
shows how they mean to rule in Korea, and the trend of
their influence in Manchuria (and in China when they
arrive) ! The conceit of it, you say. In her new era
of colonization Japan means to follow Roman more than
British methods. Simple Korea of the past! In the
style of his home, the Korean exhibits his exclusiveness,
each house being entirely surrounded with the servants'
compound. It is a green and white land, the houses and
garments being the latter color. The valuable gold bod-
ies belonged to the Imperial household. They have been
confiscated for the benefit of Japanese baronial houses,
or " Titled Trusts." The Japanese have completed the
railroads running the length of the peninsula five hundred
and fifty miles, and also across the country from Seoul to
Gensan, one hundred and sixty miles, according to pro-
gram laid out five years ago. They will be operated by
the government, which also retains the coal deposits, to
work chiefly as a war reserve. In a word, the peninsula
is to be a repetition of Egyptian occupation, but the
Kohim Hoi (Society of Daily Progress) declares the Jap-
anese will not find the Korean as docile and extinguish-
able as the Fellahin. For the East, the sickly East, the

408 THE CHINESE

climate is a joy. The summer rains are somewhat heavy.
The winters are of the Canadian type, dry and bracing.
Spring and autumn are as green and gold as the maple
leaf. China of course sympathizes with the Koreans in
what appears to be their commercial and national ex-
tinction.

While the sovereignty of China in Manchuria, which
the Committee of white Shanghai merchants called a
" second Manitoba," is reiterated by the Japanese well
organized press agency, and the irregular " American
agreement," you hear little of it along the wonderful val-
ley of the Liau Ho, which the Chinese call their " Thou-
sand Mile View." Baron Saionji has formed a trust,
called the Minami Manshu, with $75,000,000 capital, re-
stricted to a Japanese majority subscription, for the de-
velopment of the deposits of five hundred million tons of
coal in the Mil Tsi district, and connecting them by
branch railways with the old parent line to Port Arthur.
The scheme is a Manchurian Development Company with
a very broad charter and comprehensive aims under dis-
tinct Government patronage. On the railway which the
war gave her in Southern Manchuria, Japan is seeking
a loan of $150,000,000, which will be reloaned to finance
these Government-Baronial Development Companies.
The railway is to be broad-gaged so as to exchange traf-
fic with the Chinese railways coming from the south and
west, rather than to look for trade with the broader
gaged Siberian Railway at Kwang Chau Fu. Ex-
clusive of the revenue from military transport the South
Manchuria Railway is already earning $3,000,000 gold a
year, or nineteen dollars gold a mile per day. The oper-
ating expenses are forty-five per cent. China is fighting
Japan bitterly to parallel with the Fakumen Railway the

JAPAN A COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE 409

Japanese South Manchurian Railway from the Russian
railways down past Mukden to tidewater in Liaotung
Gulf. China, with America's support, can on this ques-
tion eventually force Britain to aid China and break the
unholy alliance with Japan. The Yokohama Specie Bank
is intrenched through government assistance, though the
Chinese take their notes at four per cent, less than the
Mexican silver dollar, which they are used to. An odd
feature of the wharves of Newchwang are the piles of
Japanese and Russian shell fragments, which have been
gathered from the battlefields by the indefatigable Chinese
and brought down the Liao in junks. What would we
think if similar hands had commercialized the glory of
Plevna, Metz, Vicksburg or Alexandria? But the Chi-
nese have never thought war was glory.

Another knotty problem for the future in Manchuria
is the question of taxation in the railroad zone. The
Russians control the largest part of the Chinese Eastern
Railway. The Japanese own as a war legacy the South
Manchurian Railway. Now, if the Americans, British
and French have a right to levy taxes in the settlements
of Shanghai, Tientsin, etc., why have not the Russians
and Japanese the same right in the railroad zones in Man-
churia? The foreign occupation of the ports is ancient
history and does not cut a province in two. Again, if the
Russians and Japanese have the taxation right, when will
they ever concede China's ancient right to Manchurian
sovereignty? I recommend that the Manchurian ques-
tion be treated solus, and that Russia and Japan have a
limited police privilege per mile, but not the tax right
within the zones, and that otherwise there be sincere evac-
uation of the province by the Russian and Japanese
arms. At present, the Russians admit Chinese sover-

4io THE CHINESE

eignty, and the right to divide the taxes within the rail-
way zone, and the Russians still keep the wedge in by
holding a municipal district at Harbin, all of which will
encourage Japan to invent similar claims in South Man-
churia, to the distress of other foreigners and of China.
The Japanese cotton merchants of Osaka, who are
driving America's cotton trade from Manchuria, also
despite the " American agreement," have organized into
a guild, and appointed the baronial house of Mitsui as
Manchurian Agents. The latter have obtained from the
government an advance of 6,000,000 yen at four per
cent, and the merchants are extended this rate for four
months upon their shipping bills. There is no wonder
therefore that America's cotton trade with Manchuria of
four million tads a year should be throttled, and although
Japanese consuls disguise it, Japan's entire business (rail-
way, export and manufacturing) is becoming national-
ized into the largest aggregation of baronial-government
trusts which commerce has ever experienced. To speak
the clear truth, there are very few privileges granted in
Japan unless the southern Satsuma and Cho Shin baron-
ial families, who placed the priest-Emperor over the
political-Shoguns, are first asked what they want — the
former in navy affairs and the latter in army and com-
merce. The members of the Imperial family are heavy
stock-holders in the largest Japanese steamship company.
The baronial or daimio families number two hundred and
fifty. Japan owes half a billion to America and Britain ;
she borrowed as much from her own people. Her rail-
ways cost her $200,000,000. Cotton, tobacco, matches
and other monopolies cost the government another $100,-
000,000. So it can easily be figured what the government
has to earn to live. When their jingo " Progressives "

Monster statues along the avenue to the Ming tombs, near Peking,

date 1330 A.D. The rocks on the elephant statues

have been thrown there by irreverent tourists

who were not of Oriental blood.

Monster statues on the road to the tombs of the Ming dynasty, near

Peking. Date 1330 A.D. The sheep of North China

furnish the largest part of America's wool supply.

A prophecy in fertile Manchuria, the future granary of China, Japan
and the Western United States : an American cavalry horse
discarded at the Peking siege; a Chinese waterbuffalo ;
a Mongol burro and a Manchu pony, all hitched
to a draft vehicle which carries im-
ported American cotton.

JAPAN A COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE 411

froth, many among us are beginning to cogitate that, as in
the case of the head of the Musselmen, the only way to
keep Japan from marching upon our toes is to keep her in
debt. A fever of speculative promotion of companies has
seized upon Tokio from time to time, among the incor-
porations being the Anglo-Japanese Bank, 20,000,000 yen,
formed by Okura, the J. Pierpont Morgan of Japan; Ojig-
awa Electric Power, 13,000,000 yen; the Kyoto Electric,
6,000,000 yen, and so on to a total of 160,000,000 yen in
industrials. The banks' names as a rule are tersely busi-
nesslike, merely " Sixty-fifth Bank," "Eighteenth Bank,"
etc.

On exports to Manchuria, the subsidized steamship
lines, which so far are in private control, have been com-
pelled by the government to reduce rates fifty per cent.
During the first year after the war the government
charged on its Manchurian Railway half rates on Jap-
anese goods, which alone came duty and likin free
through Tairen (Dalny), on the flimsy pretext that Rus-
sia, which is not a manufacturing nation at all, had no
custom-houses on the Manchurian border. This duty
preference amounted on cotton goods to four yen a bale.
The duties and freight rates on the South Manchurian
Railway have now been equalized by our diplomatic com-
pulsion, but government loans at a nominal rate, Jap-
anese police throttling the competing junk trade on the
Liao Ho, reduced steamship rates on Japanese goods car-
ried in Japanese bottoms, and preference car supply to
Japanese shippers from Tairen up-country, are beating
the foreigner just as effectually as ever in the race to the
Chinese bazaars of Mukden, which, by the way, are port-
able ones manufactured in Japan. In Mukden alone there
are three thousand Japanese traders. At least, they say

412 THE CHINESE

they are, though they carry a " Banzai " and a dirk under
their vests. In the controversy over the question as to
how the foreigner shall be treated in Manchuria, Viscount
Hayashi has represented the diplomatic side against the
exclusive militarism of Marquis Yamagata, on whose
heart is written a vow against the Russ, " Back to Bai-
kal," and doubtless writing against others of us, judg-
ing from what preceded the retrocession of Newchwang
in December 1906. China looks to America chiefly to
get her justice in her own province of Manchuria, and this
must be settled ere many years pass. The Japanese de-
sired that under one pretext or another their brands or
" chops " should have two years' start of the foreigner.
Another question being asked is what connection Sir
Robert Hart's withdrawal from the Chinese Imperial
Customs will have with a Chinese tariff compulsorily fa-
voring Japan. The latter feels she must win back some-
how in the next ten years the $600,000,000 she spent in
the war. The Chinese indemnity robbed her of the zeal
for that chastening experience of Pitt and Talleyrand in
paying battalions to reap glory only. Fifty thousand
Chinese a year are leaving Shan-tung Province for Man-
churia. The Japanese are sending among them free, bat-
tan weaving looms and teaching their use, so as to en-
courage the importation of Japanese cotton yarn. Japan
argues that if India with three million hand looms can
produce two-thirds of her needs in cotton fabrics, Man-
churia is not too poor to buy Japanese yarn and get to
work in clothing herself in something less humorous than
sheep-skins.

The Bureau-bossing malady in Japan's methods has
also extended to finance, the government assuming the
power of suspending any bank on the pretext of driving

JAPAN A COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE 413

undesirable persons from influence, and of ejecting from
any exchange any broker or listed bond. The govern-
ment controls the Yokohama Specie Bank and the Bank
of Japan. Before the war the Japanese banks did every-
thing possible to attract foreign money, which raised not
a little suspicion. I recall that the branch of the Yoko-
hama Specie Bank in Hong-Kong paid throughout 1903
seven per cent, to depositors against five and one-half per
cent, which they paid in Japan. No other bank in Hong-
Kong paid more than four per cent. Loans were made in
Japan at as high a rate as nine per cent. A Japanese bank
will shortly be opened in Brazil to assist Baron Shibus-
awa's new Nippon Kisen Steamship Company.

China is far behind Japan in banking. The first na-
tional bank is barely established, and its working has not
been tested, but it will of course slowly be successful and
copied.

The war table, under canvas, on a rough field, fur-
nished withal some choice crumbs, one being the $100,-
000,000 Manchurian Railway. Another was the exten-
sion of Japan's fishing privileges into Siberian waters.
They expect to take $10,000,000 a year in salmon, trout,
cod and herring, and incidentally to enlarge their naval
reserve tremendously. One of the first indications of
the new rights was the creation of a fleet of fifteen steam
whalers, with a home port on Ezo Island. A species of
menhadden herring is also pursued for oil and fertilizer.
Watch for the schools is kept from baskets erected on
poles on shore. The nets are hauled on the beach and the
fish thrown into bamboo yards until they can be tried out
in the brick ovens. About sixty per cent, of the oil is
drawn out by the fire and five per cent, by wooden presses.
The oil is soldered up in old Standard Oil kerosene cans.

414 THE CHINESE

The residue is spread in the sun and dried. In famine it
is used as food, and in good times it is powdered up for
manure. The drying process, however, costs the product
the stored phosphorus. The government is expected to
step in at any time and stop the fishing, as the menhadden
attract food fishes to the coast.

The production of crude iodine is rapidly increasing.
Two hundred thousand pounds were exported last year,
averaging one dollar and eighty cents a pound. Divers
gather it. The primitive methods of burning it still con-
tinue.

.Cricket bats, tennis rackets and nail brushes have all
won the market in Australia, despite the prejudice there
against the Nipponese. Osaka is producing menthol
crystals from distilled dried mint. The plants are raised
on the hills around Nagasaki.

The growth of the press can be judged by the produc-
tion of paper. In 1894, the year of the Japan-China
war, the Oji and Fuji mills produced thirty million
pounds. Last year they produced three hundred million
pounds and had to move their factories to Ezo (now
Hokkaido) Island for the pulp supply. In addition, Ja-
pan imported twenty-five million pounds. China as yet
knows little, save in the matter of forestry, of the policy
of conservation of national resources, such as stocking
fisheries, etc., but she will learn from Japan.

A touch of the sentimental still crops out in Japanese
business, especially in some of the decisions in equity.
The courts decided that the insurance companies need
not pay in full fire losses which were occasioned by the
Peace-News rioters, but that a compromise payment
should be made on the understanding that it was " money
of sympathy."

JAPAN A COMMERCIAL EXAMPLE 415

As it was to be expected, now that war has ceased, and
one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers lie about idle, the
Japanese courtezans have made Port Arthur and Tairen
(Dalny) like the hem of a Roman triumph with the moral
flotsam and jetsam strewn along the course. Their
'rickishas, parasols, gaudy gowns and faces have brought
unquestioned color to what before was a somber enough
scene. The Peking Times is insistent in its criticism, and
the brave Kirisu Sekai of Tokio has bordered on lese ma-
jeste in its worthy strictures. The great difficulty is in
reaching the barons and wealthy political families who
have long patronized the geisha, and taken many as sec-
ondary wives from that class. From a geisha to a cour-
tezan is more of a difference in age than a distinction in
morals. You may ask what place this has in a business
article. Only this, that Japan makes the feature a branch
of the Government Intelligence Service in every port of
the East, from Hong-Kong's " Ship Street " to Saigon's
and Singapore's " Yoshiwari " balconies in the suburbs,
and every one of these Delilahs knows how to write, and
not to drink too much saki from the stone bottles.

Eastward the tide of Nippon dares to take its way,
and as illustrating more important branches, let us cite
the unexpected line of saloon-keeping in Honolulu.
Travelers have long complained of the high price of
liquor in the islands, cocktails being twenty-five cents and
beer ten cents a glass. Japanese who learned English on
the plantations have come to the city and opened bars
where cocktails cost ten cents and beer five cents. Again
in Hong-Kong and Canton I found printing presses and
pianos copied from American models by the Japanese,
set up at prices which neither New York nor London,
with their lowest " export prices," could approach. Now,

4i6 THE CHINESE

whether it be bars or more serious endeavors, Japan
would like to do the same thing on both sides of the
Pacific, and mix a potion equally sweet and extinguishing
for his commercial rival. He lost his temper a little at
San Francisco, and surprised himself more than he did
us; but he never loses his design.

China, with her economic, able and exhaustless labor,
will learn some of the apter yellow brother's ways. She
has more latent power and our assurance is that she has
more latent character in the approaching business compe-
tition, first for the Pacific, and later for the world field.

XI

THE MIRROR OF THE PAST

China alone of the races existing to-day traces its un-
broken line back to the first evidences of history. She
was broad in her culture and stable in her institutions
when Egypt was a ruin. The Egyptian went west from
Syria and in due time collapsed because the nation was an
inverted social pyramid, balanced alone on aristocratic
wealth and arrogance. The Aryan went south to India
and lost his mind for a season in vapid philosophies
brought on by the climate. The Chinese went northeast
into Turkestan; scribbled his hieroglyphics at the same
time that Egypt was burying hers; left his hieroglyphics
there ; rose, said like Joseph " let us build granaries in-
stead of monuments," and betook himself through the
Kansu gate to his future home, from whence he was never
to look back, or owe to any one a renewed light from the
lamp of knowledge, for he kept his own vessel unbroken.
Only the rear-guard of the race kept in any touch with
the Syrian past. There are only, however, etymological
evidences. The Mongol written language shows its re-
lationship to the Hebrew and Syriac, for like them it uses
only two vowels, i and o. The other vowels must be
guessed. Though we can find no ruins or records (largely
through Emperor Tsin's mad incendiarism) dating back
to the pyramids and hieroglyphics, China has incompara-
bly the longest history as a cultured nation, which is prob-
ability enough that the race went back farther than Egypt

417

418 THE CHINESE

in her formative years of thinner culture spent in Turkes-
tan. The Devanagari, Uigur and Niu-chih characters
cut on the Ku Yung gate in the Great Wall are not an-
cient, but the work of Mongol sculptors in 1345, and the
inscriptions on the rocks near Oorga in Gobi Desert were
cut in 1215 B. C. by the Mongol men of Genghis Khan.

It is there in Turkestan, among the relics of the annual
fair camps of Mongols, Shans, Miaotszes and Lolos, that
archaeologists must look for the China which parallels
Rameses, if that is considered worth the digging for.
The numismatist may assist in these scrapings of old camp
fires and mortuary mounds. There exist coins which were
used in China when David reigned in Jerusalem, which
are exactly the same as the common cash coin of to-
day, with the exception that to-day both the Mongolian
and the Chinese characters repeat the expression, " current
coin of the realm," and the name of the Emperor. Then
how far back before David did lost coins go ? But if we
desire to make moment of the argument, which seems im-
material, we can easily surpass the hieroglyphics of Egyp-
tian history, going back to 7000 B. C., for diggings in
Szechuen Province and in Eastern Turkestan have fur-
nished similar stone adzes of the palaeolithic age, in com-
pany with bones of extinct mastodons. Even if we had
hieroglyphics, a more popular argument of the age of a
race is based on a comparative study of the formation of
the social organization, and literary product. If it took
from Moses until now, about four thousand years, to
reach our Western social and mental development, and
the Chinese had an equal development, lacking construc-
tive sciences, in 723 B. C., when Confucius wrote and
ruled, we can easily follow the race back to times contem-
porary with the Pyramids.

419

This lack of science, remember, was a heroic abnega-
tion on their part, for every principle of hydraulics, trans-
portation, navigation, construction, propulsion and refin-
ing was invented by them, but for the sake of the existence
of the many (and they instructed the national conscience
to see that there would be many), they chose the rural and
trading life as better suited to their mental and social
peace than a manufacturing organization. They blaz-
oned on their scutcheon : " To live well, not wealthy,"
and because of this faith, eternal national life has been
given them alone, of which their absolutely independent
art is the most unique manifestation. Literature, giving
an account of the creation, has come down more or less
correct from writers contemporary with Moses, which
would be 1491 B. C, and the Chinese Shu King history
takes dynastic chronology back to 2200 B. C. in Shensi
alone. Their earliest writings discussing creation show
philosophic calm and create no mythology, which is an-
other proof of the long formed and steadied nation.
The superstition of the race that it is unlucky to repair
anything has allowed thousands of monuments to pass
out every thousand years.

But enough of the past is within reach to satisfy the
hungriest antiquarian. We have the rubbings of the
Mount Hang tablet relating the inundation in tadpole
characters, which tablet went to pieces in 1666 A. D.,
after a known life of eight hundred years. These tad-
pole characters were in use by certain priests of the Hia
kings in Shensi Province in times contemporary with
Noah. In the Confucian temple at Peking are the hiero-
glyphic stone drums relating history of the Chou kings,
and which is more than remains to-day from Solomon's
Temple, which was executed at the same time. Near

420 THE CHINESE

Ichang on the Yangtze River stand the Yien-tung (lit-
erally smoke towers), which were erected as beacons dur-
ing this same dynasty. These towers were not used to
burn fire at night, but to display smoke from burning
manure by day. In present day ideograms, we have the
poet Han Yu's song of the creation and deluge, which
he wrote when the unpoetic Assyrians were taking to
Nineveh two of Thebes' obelisks on a stone boat, over a
constantly moving bed of portable stones, which they had
laid over the sands.

You can wander through Yunnan Province to-day
among the downtrodden Shan tribes and observe the heel
of oppression on a dispossessed race, for the conquering
Chinese beat them down here from the Great Plain when
the Ethiopians were doing the same thing to dying Egypt,
and Syria was likewise treating shamed Israel under
Ahaz.

A blight then came on China in the rise of Taoism
with its depressing theology, at the time when far away
the most sonorous voice and most archangelic poetry that
a human being ever sounded, were hurling lightnings
among the shadows of men's thoughts, in the words of
Isaiah.

That section of the Grand Canal (literally "grain-
carrying ") north of the Yangtze River to the Wei River,
one hundred and fifty miles, was being dug when Nebu-
chadnezzar was cutting his Royal Canal at Babylon by
gangs of captive Jews, whom his chariots had dragged
from desecrated Zion.

The worlds, West and East, were now reaching mo-
mentous hours. It was to be decided whether the far
West was to be a shambles, or if white mankind could
turn in peace and face the sun of knowledge. Marathon

The Great \Yall

climbing Liao Hsi (Iron Mountains),
Eastern Pechili Province.

North-

The Great Wall crossing the plain between the sea at Shan-Hai-

Kwan and the Liao Hsi mountains, Northeastern

Pechili Province.

A ruined fort on the old wall of Canton, South China. Tartar cav-
alry patrol the top of the wall, which is built of
sandstone and brick.

THE MIRROR OF THE PAST 421

decided it and Athens endowed us of the West for ever
with liberty and light. On that same day China reached
the iron coast of Shan-tung and she, too, turned her face
toward the sun of knowledge, while Confucius wrote
what she saw. His original manuscripts were lost; many
succeeding copies were lost, but the succession was sure.
His words were good and mankind was sure to hold
them fast. Antiquarians,' however, can handle some-
thing age-damp of this period in the Bamboo Books, dat-
ing back to 300 B. C., found in a priest's tomb in Honan
at the time when Zenobia was shining in the West with
that barbaric beauty which has dazzled history, which
was only too willing to record such things for a race
that liked them.

Events now cluster in our little western world. Philip
of Macedon and Demosthenes exchanged the enginery of
javelin and anathema. The Colossus of Rhodes was
built from the wreckage of Athenian and Egyptian de-
feat. Ptolemy Philopater, the fratricide, overran Bible
lands and sowed salt under the heels of his spurning.
Hannibal challenged the Roman Republic and Rome re-
taliated upon the walls of Carthage. Destroyers these
were, so that all we have to-day safe from their hands
is the little Magna Mater temple at Rome and at Edfu
that nearest perfect example extant of an Egyptian tem-
ple. Untutored by all this, not wotting of it, over the
misty iron Roof of the World, yea, onward a year's jour-
ney to the Yellow Sea, we find the Giant Mason of all
time pacing up and down before a clay model of the
known earth; pushing his engineers aside and drawing
his trowel-sword across the models of mountains six
thousand feet high, and decreeing " there it shall go."
The Giant Mason was Tsin Chi. He had a palace and

422 THE CHINESE

a throne besides, but they were his toys. Work was
his hobby, and that hobby the Great Wall of China, the
most marvelous monument ever erected by man, and
standing for your wonder and mine even to-day and
for ever. He was a grim humorist, too; when vassal
lords of rebellious eye and mien visited him in his
capital, Hienyang, he was wont personally to conduct
them to a little object lesson in the back yard: toy rep-
licas of the palaces of rebellious princes whom he was
compelled to annihilate. He told these same vassals he
would see them in a year, but he suddenly dropped in on
them in six months and increased the tribute.

He was always up and down his kingdom at the head
of armies, and he built great roads, for we do not learn
that any successful rebellion got under way before his
armies arrived back. He exacted mercenaries, just as
Carthage was then doing across the Roof of the World.
He extended the Grand Canal, because he was collecting
grain for a work which should surpass even the superla-
tives of his soothsayers. He was here an adopter; there
an originator. Other princes had raised protecting walls
against his inroads. He took them ; added to them ; com-
bined them into a Wall Trust. He was the first great In-
corporator, Amalgamator, Financier, Despot and Trust
King, and he boasted of the faults and virtues of them all.
As he grew older, he believed occasional war was invented
to achieve accumulated peace. He believed in trade, for
he didn't tax his highways. He taxed luxuries, aristo-
crats, and rebels. He has for all time given the name of
his dynasty to his country because of this monument, and
history says it at least is worthy.

The wall is fifteen hundred miles long and has the ap-
pearance of a mighty dragon encircling the world, and

THE MIRROR OF THE PAST 423

hugging it deep in vale, and high over hill. Some bricks
weigh sixty pounds. At the base it is twenty-five feet
across ; it is twenty-five feet high, and fifteen feet wide at
the top. Towers every mile or so stand twenty feet above
the wall, and they are often built as redoubts on an inde-
pendent base. At places the wall mounts fifteen hundred
feet in the sky. Twenty thousand soldier masons labored
at it for ten years. Four hundred thousand soldiers
protected the twenty thousand trowel men from the Tur-
kestan Mongols, whose " cousinly " ambitions and traits
Tsin Chi well knew. Twenty thousand more soldiers
were in the Commissariat Department, which farmed as
it moved. Thirty thousand more men were in the Army
Service and Transport Corps, which had a Potter's and a
Quarry Department. China was then a nation of sixty
millions. Tsin was a peace-maker, for these manceuvers
kept four hundred and seventy thousand men for ten
years at harmless play, and away from their brothers'
throats. Indeed, in this way he peopled the Mongol
plains and made possible the later Tartar invasions and
dynasties, irony though such a result is, and he as well
made it to come to pass that Russia should be largely
Oriental in blood and taste.

He was a sane and beneficent ruler until he finished
parts of the Wall. He was a mighty ruler as he watched
them grow, but it is not good for man to contemplate too
long things done. He went mad over the possibilities of
what he had conceived when it should be completed. When
the Pharaohs built the Pyramids, they immured their
hieroglyphic records in them, and probably, too, went
as mad, and destroyed everything that praised a lesser
or a rival being. Tsin Chi decreed history should
date from his day, and popular readers may agree with

424 THE CHINESE

his wishes, for perhaps we are all getting tired of these
antiquarian chapters, which take every race wading
through the flood to times contemporary with Luxor and
Babylon. He ordered the destruction of the books and
records, which has made it so difficult for the sinologue
who essays personally to conduct to the Ark. Even five
hundred priests, most famous for their memorizing of
history in a land where memorizing reached its perfec-
tion, were burned. It is not impossible that the Great
Wall will give up, as the years go by, tablets surrep-
titiously and ironically put there by rebels to this insane
edict, and thus link us back to times in Turkestan con-
temporary with Rameses, which would only be from the
Shu King books, contemporary with Noah, back two
thousand three hundred years. The Great Wall has been
copied in walls about every city. Enough labor has been
wasted in such work to have girded the land with perma-
nent highways and lock-canals which would be floodless.
Only a land which has teemed with millions of people,
even back to Noah's time, could have stood the waste.
Say that there are six hundred cities, averaging fifteen
miles around each; here are nine thousand more miles of
wall. It was largely this waste of labor, values, money
and mental patience, which robbed the toil-driven Chi-
nese of the desire to carve monuments, strike coins, cut
ideograms into stone, metal and porcelain, and load tombs
with archaeological treasure, so that here Tsin Chi has
made us poorer because of his mad vanity-Trust. There
are other records of Tsin Chi's work. In the records of
the far western province of Szechuen, which were re-
written as the old copies wore out, it is inscribed that the
first three miles of the present wall of the capital Chingtoo
were erected in his reign.

THE MIRROR OF THE PAST 425

The last of Egypt and mock-Egypt had been seen, and
Manetho in 270 B. C. composed an epitaph upon its cul-
ture and arms in a history written in the Greek language.
China, ever renewing itself independently of all outside
influences, was even more refulgent than usual in social,
martial and literary glory. When Roman Republicanism
fought for its franchise, and Sulla offered it a halter on
the way from Nola to Rome, Szma Tsien was writing his
great history of one hundred and thirty chapters, which
flooded twenty-two centuries with the light of returned
day. You would not call his style ponderous like Gib-
bon's, or classically pure like Macaulay's, but vivacious
like Green's or Herodotus'. Largely through Szma
Tsien's influence, literature was established for all time
as the key to political preferment, and the classical exam-
inations became universal.

When Christ was born, the Emperor of Peace (Ping
Ti) of the Han Dynasty was reigning in China. For
thousands of years China had been fully civilized. The
rich brine and natural gas wells at Tsz-liu-tsin in Sze-
chuen, which are still worked, are mentioned in the writ-
ings of the Taoist priest, Lunghusan, first century. Here,
then, is a vast enterprise, producing one hundred thousand
tons a year of salt, with a continuous history of twenty
centuries, contributing its share to reveal the ancient com-
mercial stability of this people. No other country in the
opening century of the Christian era had such a commer-
cial development. Religion had long consisted of a litur-
gy for the honoring of ancestors and the practice of a de-
cided moral life on the part of a man as individual and
citizen. The Christian apostles, and the Buddhists of In-
dia, at the same time started to preach their gospels to the
long- forgotten, the new-discovered eastern world, which

426 THE CHINESE

now reached its fullest extension by absorbing Cochin,
and St. Thomas, or a disciple, is reported to have reached
Canton. Buddhism was more largely equipped and was
widely successful in the north of China. Heathen Rome
was then erecting the Colosseum for Titus, and followed
it by Trajan's superb column. They liked toys more
than philosophies, those cringers to tyrants, our Latin
forefathers. The cycles rolled and ever accumulated
pagodas, like the luxurious Flower Pagoda yet standing
in Canton, as well as balustrades, and monasteries, until
the sweet Nestorians came with a faint second echo of
Christianity, and that dear melancholy tablet, cut in 781,
the most precious stone existing in all the world, which
lies in a temple compound in Singan, the first capital of
the united Chinese.

Then followed the Mohammedans, matching minaret
against pagoda, until the arm of the law like a wedge has
driven the remnant of their rebellion only to the north
and south of the kingdom. Mohammedanism challenged
Buddhism to renewed art, and the latter responded with
the hexagonal seven-storied " Tien Fung " pagoda at
Ningpo, which is still standing. But grander still, the
gem of Chinese art remaining to-day, she fashioned the
falcon-like curves of the Loong Wah pagoda, when the
best that Europe was doing was the dreary wooden huts
of Charlemagne, disconsolate perhaps after losing his
Roland at Roncesvalles. These two are but a salvage
from thousands of such monuments which were erected
in the next two hundred years. When Canute the Dane
scourged our barbarian English, who retreated into path-
less forests and resigned their huts to his firebrand ; when
the new Russian nation on the one hand and the new
Arab nation on the other, rivals for the term " World's

THE MIRROR OF THE PAST 427

Iconoclast," were in turn trying to knock down the walls
of Constantine's palace at Byzantium; when the earlier
Popes drew a longer sword than a ready prayer ; — sane,
steady, artistic China had not deviated from the immemo-
rial paths of magnificent peace and culture, as sayeth still
that grand witness, some of the stone piers and bulwarks
of the " Ten Thousand Ages " bridge at Fu-chau.
There was nothing but truth in this art, and the national
spirit was truth, and the truth was freedom. It owed
nothing to any other race. It came before them and lived
after them, and while conceding its beauty of curve and
carving, none has been strong enough to copy.

It mattered little if a wilder kindred tribe took for a
season the mace and crown. The people ruled them-
selves each in his own place by a conscience that brooked
no rebellion or impatience or lack of faith. They knew
that those who broke in roughly among them for honors,
or out of ignorant intrusion (for they accumulated not
wealth save for their need from day to day), would soon
by the preponderating example of virtue be as obedient
to patriotism as themselves. So we soon find the Mon-
gol Genghis building canals, marble summer palaces in
the Gobi Desert between Kalgan and Urga, and those un-
opened grave mounds at Kalgan ; and his grandson Kub-
lai building national fleets. But Europe thinks more of
the latter, not because he took the Master's course at the
hands of his subject-tutors, but because he entertained
one Polo, a Venetian. That he entertained him with
breeding which was a revelation of wonders, let the same
Polo say through a thousand noted pages, which taught
the western world its first manners. The men of Geng-
his made graves as follows: The body was taken into
the open, surrounded with dried dung (argol), twigs

428 THE CHINESE

and anything burnable, and burned. Then each one of
the host flung a stone and relics on the ashes. As time
went on, sand and earth made a mound of this cairn.

Art overcame arms, as it always will in refined China.
The encyclopedia writers, the potters, the elder brothers
of the purple people themselves, came back into their own
in the famous, delightful Mings, the last reigning house
of the pure Chinese. You know that grandest arch in the
world, so wide, airy and free, at the entrance to the four-
mile amphitheatre twenty-five miles from Peking, and
the Herculean statuary of twenty-two figures or more,
solemn distances apart in the open plain : warriors ; horses ;
elephants; tigers; camels; lions, standing and recumbent
in pairs, and then the tombs of the Mings, with acres of
silence between each. Gorgeous in life he is the plainest
in death, Yung Loh, who thought this haven of the soul
all out. Marble bridges, green and yellow-tiled pailos,
painted and chiseled inscriptions, take up the broken
theme of woe as you wander on from hillock to hillock,
and disturb alone the meadow lark, the grasshopper and
your memories. Considering it is eternal China, there is
no antiquity here, but for us Westerners it was the day of
Notre Dame and the first part of the Louvre, and these,
too, were a gorgeous curtain across the passing of royalty.

When King James' translators were at work upon our
Protestant Bible, an unfamiliar band of Manchus were
setting up that Temple of Literature at Mukden, which
you can enter to-day, and which the Japanese spat upon,
for they have found a different key to life, and sixty-
three miles east on the Tsz-yun Mountains these same
Manchus were putting in order another tomb for one now
unpegging his felt Bao tent, who would come home either
as a dead shepherd, or as the conqueror of the earth's

THE MIRROR OF THE PAST 429

widest throne, to pay thanks and vows to his father's
faithful manes. Comparatively modern as is the begin-
ning of this Tsin (pure) Dynasty in China, it is still
hoary with age as compared with the oldest thrones of
our white man's world. The exploits of arms, and by
sea, of Richelieu in France and Cromwell in England,
covered a puny space as compared with the hosts and dis-
tances with which their contemporary, Shun Chi, the next
Manchu king, had to deal in his work of organization.
It was the following sovereign, Kang He, who reigned,
keeping company with Louis XIV. all along fifty-four
years of royal road, who was the grandest of this present
Manchu dynasty, which may flutter like a candle flame
and die before long. Its greatest mind, but weakest arm,
was the beloved Kwang Su, deceased as a martyr only
yesterday by sinister causes, and on whose inspiring
edicts of 1897 tne present blessed constitutional hopes of
China are based.

THE END

INDEX

INDEX

ABORIGINES, 217

Agriculture, 60, 64, 73, 85, 108,

121, 144, 152, 170, 188, 203, 221,

227, 238, 240, 243, 309, 310, 316,

319, 321, 337, 348, 381
Ah Fong, 84

American Business Firms, 8, 64
American Interests in Orient, 27,

49, 173, 187, 201, 207, 209, 240,

278, 292, 293, 298, 303, 309, 334,

335, 348, 388, 392, 409, 412
Amoy, 328
Ancestor worship, 61, 67, 86, 99,

103, 109, in, 151, 153, 369, 372
Animals, 51, 71, 144, 152, 320
Antiquities, 417, 421
Ants, White, 329
Arches, 127, 156, 285, 428
Architecture, 31, 33, 35, 36, 67,

75, 80, 84, 86, 112, 117, 127, 155,

230, 247, 285
Army, Chinese, 97, 134, 161, 192,

197, 203, 208, 240, 255, 312, 349,

423

Arms, 62, 78, 161, 207
Army Life, Foreign, 10, 13, 16,

18, 21, 27, 29, 30, 32, 48, 70,

78, 80, 88, 183, 326, 343, 350
Art, 248, 286, 317, 318, 334, 339,

385

Artisans, 116

Australia, 50, 132, 209, 387
Automobiles, 47

BALL, 27

Bamboo, 51, 73. 82, 240, 314, 315

Bangkok, 332

Banking, 6, 20, 26, 69, 125, 143,

165, 174, 304, 306, 314, 411, 413
Banners, no
Barber, 46, 70
Bathing, 22, 153, 351
Beds, 154

Beggars, 66, 69, 176
Belgians in China, 290
Bethrothal, 38, 128, 135
Birds, 50, 135, 308
Birds' Nests Soup, 66
Boat Building, 114, 117
Boat Life, 12, 19, 30, 52, 63, 78,

82, 136, 231, 237, 243, 315, 332,

343, 355
Bonze, 173

Bowring, Sir John, 48, 95
Boxers, 192, 195, 210, 291, 367
Boycotts, 207, 214
Boys, 135, 275

Bredon, Robert, 14, 60, 191, 224
Bridges, 230, 290
British in China, 209, 237, 278,

293, 303, 321, 329, 349, 378, 389,

409

Bubonic Plague, 24, 87, 326
Buddhists, 23, 38, 99, 146, 175,

245, 255, 283, 308, 364, 372, 374,

378, 425
Buffaloes, Water, 144, 228, 292,

3"

433

434

INDEX

Burning of Books, 424

Business Methods, 8, 26, 49, 136,
139, 145, 158, 197, 201, 213, 255,
259, 284, 290, 312, 314, 323

Butterfield & Swire, 7, 8, 55, 390

CAMOENS, 78, 87
Canals, 64, 230, 420, 424
Canton, 10, 63, 102, 124, 136, 164,

193, 216, 224, 248, 274, 286, 290,

311, 323, 365
Cantonese, The, 58, 71, 189, 217,

219

Casa de Misericordia, 83
Catholic (Roman) Missions, 367
Cats, 152

Cattle, 53, 144, 308, 309, 348
Cement, 8
Cemeteries, 52, 108, in, 202, 327,

33i, 350, 370
Census, no, 152
Chairs, 18, 34, 39, 65, 68, 149, 153.

175, 216, 248, 342, 352
Chang Chih Tung, 127, 191, 197,

204, 293, 304, 312, 335, 395, 404
Chifu, 345

Ching, Prince, 127, 196
Ching-Too, 322, 424
" Chit " System, 26
Chronology, 151, 417
Chukiang (Pearl River), 49
Chun, Prince (Regent), 191, 196,

211

Cicada, 38

Clan-life, 168, 182, 228, 383
Classical Examinations, 99, 197,

214

Cliff Dwellings, 157, 226
Climate, 326, 330, 334, 341, 344
Clocks, 158
Clubs, (social), 9, 13, 19, 26, 29,

31, 68, 119

Coal, 7, 55, 155, 176, 201, 238,
241, 290, 291, 294, 395, 408

Cobbler, 47, 56, 68, 69

Colors, 149

Comprador, 26

Concessions to Foreign Com-
panies, 201

Confucius, 102, 181, 203, 212, 262,
269, 280, 363, 365, 372, 374. 378,
384, 418, 421

Conjurer, 147

Copper, 405

Copyright, 397

Crews, Ship, 58, 389, 393

Crime, 52, 57, 68, 77, 81, 99, 105,
124, 158, 160, 166, 184, 336, 383

Criticism of Anglo-Saxons by
Chinese, 278

Cuisine, 69, 77, 107, 118, 120, 149,
153, 319

Curios, 62, 66

Currency, 304

Cursing, 68, 217

Curzon, Lord, 188

Customs Service, Imperial, 60,
123, 125, 191, 224, 256, 303, 305

DANES in China, 301

Death, 26, 61, 109, 358, 365, 382

Dialects, 254, 256

Diseases, 22, 24, 29, 31, 54, 61,

105, 114, 150, 255, 294, 326, 329,

332, 348

Docks, 54, 303, 370, 387, 390, 394
Dogs, 85, 107, 108, 228, 318
Do-Shing, 72

Dragon, 36, 82, 160, 202, 381
Dress, 15, 20, 31, 59, 80, 149, 225,

228, 282, 315, 378

ECONOMICS, 89, 116, 267, 271, 273,
278, 306, 313, 383, 410, 417, 419,
427

INDEX

435

Education, 99, 126, 177, 189, 195,

214, 221, 260, 386, 400
Eliot, Sir John, 213
Elliot, Charles, 205
Emigrants, 59, 84, 109, 154, 169,

190, 194, 199, 202, 2l8, 220, 221,

281, 295, 320, 412
Empress Dowager, Tse Hsi, 133,

191, 192, 210
English, The, 95
Eunuchs, 165
Eurasians, 21
Examinations, 99, 141, 212, 224,

264, 425
Exclusion Act of America, 202,

281
Extra-territoriality Regimes, 163,

199, 200, 409
Ezo Island, 398

FAMINES, 112, 124, 157, 217, 239,

264, 379
Fans, 19

Fertilizers, 124, 228, 309, 323, 348
Filipinos, 220
Fire-crackers, 63, 318
Fires, 60, 65, 154, 251
Fish, 114, 118, 149, 152, 176, 308,

413
Floods, 73, 217, 235, 238, 239, 301,

347, 357

Flour, 26, 59, 138, 312, 392
Flowers, 38, 51, 96, 149, 152, 275,

334

Foot-binding, 224
Foreign Powers, Political Rela-
tions with, 62, 76, 87, 124, 186,
189, 199, 201, 216, 278, 290, 335,
367

Formosa, 209, 218, 341, 405
Forts, 29, 33, 61, 76, 104, 318
France in China, 76, 200, 201,
204, 242, 294, 296, 360, 368, 409

Fruit, 119, 230, 241, 296, 308, 310

Fu-chau, 240, 310

Funeral, 175

Fung-kwei, 70, 257

Fungshui, 37, 108, 299, 308, 368,

377, 395

Furniture, 334, 399
Furs, 44, 69

GAMBLING, i, 58, 59, 66, 82, 83,

139, 141, 305
Games, 135, 170, 301, 352, 359,

362
Gardens, 51, 67, 85, 86, 230,

247

Gas, 314, 425
Gates, 104, 106
Geisha, 340
Genghis Khan, 219, 241, 263, 386,

418, 427

Geology, 60, 203, 242, 287
Geomancy, 37, 108, 299, 308, 368,

377

Germans in China, 13, 95, 107,
119, 200, 204, 237, 247, 309, 323,

389

Ginger, 66
Ginseng, 354
Goa, 89
Gobi Desert, 190, 234, 300, 301,

427

God, 261, 385
Goddess, 375, 382
Gold, 321, 405, 406
Golf in China, 2, 35, 50, 84
Gong, 104

Gordon, " Chinese," 205
Government, 168, 170, 264, 313,

383, 427

Governors, Foreign, 28, 34
Grand Canal, 230, 420, 422
Graves, 108, 227, 427
Greek Influence, 375

436

INDEX

Guilds, 68, 117, 189, 210, 213
Gymkanas, 2

HAIR, 106, 219

Hakka tribe, 19, 60, 62, 138, 151,

174. 217, 224, 333, 358, 363
Han River, 239
Hang-chow, 379
Han-kau, 132, 142, 239, 245, 290,

324, 390, 395, 406
Han-yang, 291, 318
Happy Valley, 2, 331
Hara-kiri, 134
Harbor Dues in Orient, 5
Hart, Sir Robt., 60, 125, 168, 224,

256, 302, 366, 412
Heat, 2, 21, 28, 30, 58, 63, 77, 80,

157, 229, 343, 349
Hieroglyphics, 417
Hindoos, 16, 18, 41, 42, 43, 57, 187
Hoang-ho (river), 235, 237, 241,

290, 301

Hoare, Bishop J. C, 361
Hong, A, 27

Hong- Kong's Architecture, 31
Hong-Kong's Clubs, 9
Hong-Kong's Botanic Gardens,

Si

Hong-Kong's Fortifications, 29
Hong-Kong's Harbor, 5, 60, 63,

137, 144, 174, 309, 342, 357
Hong-Kong, in general, 207, 217,

221, 264, 274, 292, 302, 305, 308,

309, 3", 326, 338, 342, 369
Hong-Kong's Race Week, i
Hong-Kong & Shanghai Bank,

6, 33, 221, 293
Horses, I, 21, 31, 204
Hospitals, 61, 344
Hotels, 10, 31, 68, 76, 155, 284
Houses, 69, 80, 84, 107, 129, 133,
151, 154, 157, 226, 318, 330, 334,

3.50

Humor, 47, no, 162, 173, 319,

339, 380, 384

Hung Siu Tsuen, 102, 150
Hygiene, 25, 34, 329, 341
Hypnotism, 148

ICE, 121

Idols, 249, 380

Ignez de Castro, 94

Incense, no, 366

Indemnities, Chinese, 205, 293,

341

India's Railways, 300
Industrial Progress, 197, 201,

238, 280, 290, 301, 303, 304, 308,

3H, 313, 3i6, 321, 325, 390, 395,

398, 415, 419
Infanticide 112
Insects, 38, 138, 139, 155, 226,

277, 329, 344, 35i, 354
Iron, 290, 395, 406
Irrigation, 238, 295

JACKSON, SIR THOMAS, 6

Jail, 38

Japanese, 17, 49, 100, 134, 187,
188, 191, 198, 200, 201, 203, 206,
208, 216, 220, 244, 261, 282, 290,
299, 303, 308, 313, 316, 326, 329,
36o, 373, 387, 428

Jardine, Matheson & Co., 7, 390

Jewelry, 17, 44, 47, 66, 286, 287

Jews in China, 219, 385, 420

Jinrickisha, 28, 302

Joseph, 417

Joss House, 36

Junk Bay, 23, 40

Juries, 5, 99, 164, 189

KAIFONG, 219, 238, 240, 385

Kaikhta, 300

Kalgan, 294

Kang Yu Wei, 188, 191, 193

INDEX

437

Kansu, 417

Keppell, Admiral, 8, 35

Kiao-chou, 200

King Teh Ching, 250

Kites, 135

Korea, 171, 209, 274, 406

Kowloon, 35, 41, 61, 200, 217, 319

Kublai Khan, 199, 206, 244, 389,

427
Kwangtung Province, 51, 149,

150, 151, 190, 206, 207, 217, 219,

225, 227, 274, 306
Kwang Su, Emperor, 100, 192,

193, 196, 210, 429

LACQUER, 53, 113, 158, 287

Lakes, 232, 234

Lamps, 151, 153

Land, 7, 121, 168, 228, 299, 304,

312

Language, 254, 259
Lanterns, 12, 36, 69, 70, 77, no,

141, 238, 249, 283, 379, 381
Launches, 29
Law, Foreign, 4, 20, 33
Law, Native, 53, 98, 124, 125,

148, 160, 163, 165, 200, 315
Lepers, 332
Letters, 159, 177, 222
Liang Chih Choa, 195
Lighthouses, 30, 60, 125
Li Hung Chang, 52, 123, 165,

192, 278
Likin Tax, 303

Ling Chih Punishment, 161, 164
Lintin Island, 64
Lin Tseh Su, 341
Liquor in China, u, 22, 26, 27,

29, 76, 80, 85, 119, 121, 141, 161,

172
Literature, Foreign, 48, 79, 82,

88, 91, 370

Literature, Native, 102, 127, 197,
216, 258, 260, 264, 276, 375, 380
Locks, 158, 174
Loess, 62, 231, 235, 292
Longfellow, 250, 280
Loti Tax, 313, 320
Lottery, 18
Lukong, 20
Lusiad, 79, 89, 92

MACAO, 75, 79, 90, 108, 115, 200,

207, 216, 219, 245, 302, 318, 350,

370

Mafoos, i
Manchus, 66, 98, 188, 192, 194,

196, 198, 200, 212, 250, 262, 400,

428
Manchuria, 190, 206, 209, 262,

284, 300, 310, 321, 407, 411
Manila, 87, 151, 186, 220, 302,

348, 356, 362, 387
Manners, 68, 125, 139, 149, 155,

159, 427

Marco Polo, 83, 230, 427
Marriage, 128, 218, 313, 376, 419
Matting, 73, 395
Measures, 143
Medical Matters, 69, 101, 104,

136, 310, 326, 348, 352
Meteorites, 384
Metropolitan Museum of Art,

New York City, Chinese Spec-
imens in, 246, 251, 287, 372
Military Life in China, Foreign,

10, 13, 16, 18, 21, 27, 29, 30, 32,

42, 48, 70, 78, 80, 88, 183, 326,

343, 350
Military Life, Chinese, 97, 123,

134, 192, 197, 203, 208, 240, 244,

255, 312, 349, 423
Milk. 53
Mines, 289, 291, 294, 296, 313,

320, 395, 404

INDEX

Ming Dynasty, 428
Ming Tombs, 285, 428
Miracles, 375
Mirs Bay, 2, 237
Misericordia, Casa de, 83
Missions, 15, 32, 65, 80, 81, 91,

103, 127, 200, 263, 319, 361,

367, 381, 425

Mitsui Company, 54, 391, 394, 410
Mohammedans, 41, 66, in, 169,

219, 378, 386, 426
Money, 304
Mongols, 235, 240, 262, 304, 374,

417, 423
Monuments, 113, 127, 156, 419,

426

Morley, John, 338
Morrison, Robt, 82, 361, 370
Mountains, 31, 32, 34, 37, 45, 60,

73, 225, 226, 244, 308, 342, 347,

365

Mukden, 220, 411
Music, 13, 27, 41, 47, 80, 150, 329
Musk, 320

NAMES, 253, 275, 373

Nanking, 19, 102, 153, 245, 286,

288, 332
Natural History Museum, New

York City, Meteorite in, 384
Navies, Chinese, 224, 244, 393
Navies, Foreign, 28, 49, 54, 70,

78, 123, 207, 209, 355, 358, 389
Nestorian Tablet, 371
Nestorians, 370, 386, 426
New China Parties, 53, 97, 187,

193. 207, 293
Newchwang, 323
Newpapers, Foreign, 48
Newspapers, Chinese, 113, 165,

175, 199, 214, 260, 264, 307, 334
New Year Celebration, 98, 139
Ningpo, 226, 274, 426

Numerals, 142
Nuns, 375

OATHS, 162

Oil, 151, 304, 309, 323, 391

Opium, 77, 87, 99, 122, 124, 135,

172, 206, 215, 281, 316, 334
Osaka, 388, 404

PAGODAS, 65, 245, 426

Painting, 286, 288, 316

Paos, 113, 165, 175, 199, 214, 260,

264, 307, 334

Paper-making, 240, 315, 414
Paris-mutuels Betting, i
Parsees, i, 14, 17, 18, 35, 174
Patents, 396
Patriotism, New, 53
Pawn-shops, 65, 210, 214, 226,

228, 307

Pearl River (Chukiang), 49
Peking, Siege of, 42, 195, 201
Peking Gazette, 264
Peking, in general, 70, 106, 161,

189, 204, 219, 235, 245, 276, 290,

298

Philippines, 220
Philosophy, 267, 280, 302, 331,

374

Physicians, 69, 332, 352
Pidgin-English, 258
Pigs, 146, 185, 376
Pipes, 151, 339
Pirates, 17, 49, 64, 65, 75, 78,

106, in, 122, 123, 125, 161, 207,

229
Police, 40, 42, 57, 77, 86, 104, 140,

218, 324
Political Progress, 60, 61, 186,

191, 192, 198, 202, 205, 206, 208,

212, 214, 224, 259, 264, 278, 373,

429
Poor, The, 39, 74, 112, 113, 124,

INDEX

439

134, 145, 166, 167, 184, 228, 253,

264, 279, 303, 306, 309, 313, 314,

316, 318, 319, 324. 329. 332, 336,

375
Portuguese, The, 75, 79, 84, 88,

92, 200, 216, 219, 242, 249, 318,

350

Postal Service, 159, 301
Pottery, 60, 246, 249, 422
Processions, 81, 139, 214, 215
Protestantism in China, 82, 103,

263, 361, 369, 381
Public Utilities, 322, 323, 324
Punishments, 161, 163, 315

RACES, HORSE, i, 106

Railways in China, 6, 7, 27, 134,
143, 190, 197, 203, 207, 213, 228,
239, 254, 200, 296, 300, 302, 307,
324, 395, 399, 402, 408, 413

Railways in India, 300

Railways in Japan, 402

Railways in Siberia, 403

Rain, 53, 346

Rates of Transportation, 73, 298,

389

Rats, 24, 106
Reclamation, 55
Red River, Tonquin, 351
Reforestation, 60, 116, 233, 236,

239, 3i6, 399, 4M
Religions, 41, 43, 58, III, 138,

163, 173, 244, 247, 358, 363, 379
Regent, Prince Chun, 191, 196,

211

Representation, Political, 165, 187
Reptiles, 330

Rice, 121, 227, 311, 337, 347, 349
Richtofen, 201, 291, 297
'Rickisha, 28, 302
Riots, 42, 216, 367
Rivers, 71, 114, 233, 235, 239, 301

Roads, Country, 62, 76, 84, 156,

171, 322

Romans, 244, 381, 425, 426
Roosevelt, Theodore, 193, 293,

380

Ruins, 80, 231, 357
Russell & Company, 8
Russians, 132, 187, 201, 204, 219,

300, 321, 403, 409, 423, 426

SAIGON, 332

" Sainam ", 5, 6, 17, 71, 124

Salt, 122, 304, 314, 405

Schools, 259, 260

Scotch in China, 27, 48, 54, 173

Sculpture, 288

Secret Societies, 15, 97, 162, 191,

206, 339
Servants, Chinese, 28, 45, 159,

177, 182, 302

Seward, Secretary Wm. H., 221
Shameen Island, 65, 248
Shanghai, 134, 200, 225, 235, 274,

290, 298, 332
Shansi Province, 241, 274, 291,

297, 367
Shan-tung Province, 220, 235,

274, 295, 412, 421
Shensi Province, 201, 228, 274,

304, 314, 379, 419
Shipbuilding, 54, 303, 391
Shipping, 5, 58, 59, 87, 109, 145,

149, 251, 298, 387
Shoes, 56

Shops, 180, 182, 283, 287, 354
Shorthand, 259
Shroffs, 261, 283
Shum, Viceroy, 124, 191
Siberian Railway, 403
Siesta System, 30
Sikiang (West River), 17, 23,

52, 71, 115, 123, 245, 347

440

INDEX

Silk, 56, 107, 241, 316, 317

Society, Foreign, 2, 27, 182, 183

Soochow, 231, 245

Soy, 319

Spectacles, 159

Sport, I, 8, 21, 44, 134, 145, 229,

352, 359

SL Andrew's Ball, 27
St. Thomas, 425
Stanley, 350
Statues, 32
Steamboats, 30, 75, in, 122, 136,

221, 243, 335
Stone Battles, 170
Story-tellers, 69
Stoves, 154

Street Life, 68, 283, 302
Students, 100, 101, 215, 399
Subsidy of Shipping, 389, 391,

392, 394, 4"
Suffrage, 100
Sugar production, 7
Suicide, 135
Sun Yat Sen, 194
Superstitions, 80, 106, 136, 142,

150, 244, 247, 345, 363, 377, 382,

384
Szechuen Province, 149, 151,

217, 219, 231, 274, 304, 314, 322,
334, 365, 4i8

TABLETS, in, 262

Taeping Rebellion, 150, 161, 193,

218, 245, 367, 379

Taoists, 18, 44, 53, 364, 368, 377,

378, 420
Tailors, 56
Tattooer, 56
Taxes, 63, 68, 166, 168, 184, 206,

216, 224, 303, 312, 313, 338, 401
Tea, 119, 129, 55, 290, 323
Teak, 10, 40, 248

Telegraphs, 256, 259, 301

Telephones, 48

Temples, 36, 65, 66, 71, 72, 113,

240, 247, 252, 288, 308, 358, 365,

380

Theaters, 119, 281
Thibit, 132, 147, 186, 241, 254,

263, 274, 312, 321, 365
Tientsin, 368
Tin, 320
Tobacco, 151
Tones in Speech, 258
Treaties, 303
Treaty Ports, Foreign Life at,

I, 9
Trees, 25, 33, 51, 57, 96, 133, 226,

232, 236, 239, 309, 343, 377, 399
Tse Hsi, Empress Dowager, 133,

191, 192, 210

Tsin Chi, Emperor, 417, 421
Turkestan, 417, 418, 424
Typhoons, 31, 73, 136, 355

UNIONS, TRADES, 117, 145, 317
U. S. Marine Hospital Service

in China, 348
Utilities, Public, 322, 323, 324

VASCO DA GAMA, 94, 242, 248, 331
Vermilion, 288
Village Life, 228

WAGES, 321, 389, 394, 401
Wai Wu Pu, 180, 294, 337
Wall, Great, 65, 105, 204, 230,

251, 297, 421
Walls, 61, 76, 85, 86, 104, 129,

223, 285, 318, 424
Warehouse, 149
Washing, 52
Water for Drinking, 22, 24, 130,

218, 232, 323

INDEX

441

Water Life, 12, 19, 23, 25, 29, 30,
52, 63, 73, 82, 96, 134, 136, 148,
202, 225, 230, 231, 233, 243, 332

Weights, 144, 403

Wei-hai-wei, 321, 345

Whompoa, 6, 27, 54, 64, 207, 292,
324

White Cloud Hills, 109

Women, 20, 27, 45, 60, 66, no,
120, 126, 128, 135, 137, 146, 155,

174, 197, 200, 223, 224, 227, 230,

249, 261, 275, 282, 302, 316, 324,

374, 415

Wong Nei Chong Valley, 2, 331
Wood-carving, 248

Wool, 317
Woosung, 134, 235
Writing, 136, 254, 259
Wu Ting Fang, 60, 160, 195

YAMENS, 37, 68

Yangtze River, 52, 204, 230,

233, 237, 274, 290, 293, 301, 337,

39i
Yellow River, 235, 237, 241, 290,

301
Yuan Shih Kai, 191, 192, 201,

224, 275
Yunnan, 252, 274, 294, 301, 320,

327, 334, 337, 379